Americans’ faith in higher education is collapsing at a record clip according to a new NBC News poll, which shows that 63 percent of voters now say a four-year degree is not worth the cost. That figure represents a stark reversal from 2013, when only 40 percent of Americans said the same.
Other surveys tell the same story. A September Gallup poll found that only 35 percent of adults now consider college “very important,” down from roughly 70–75 percent in the early 2010s.
When you add tuition, living costs, loan interest, and lost earnings, the bill for a bachelor’s degree can easily top $500,000 and it no longer guarantees a job or economic mobility. One in four unemployed Americans now have a college degree – a record high, and up from around 10 percent in 2000.
Americans now see college for what it has become: a bad deal. The distrust cuts across every demographic.
According to the NBC poll, just 33 percent of Americans now say college is worth the cost. As recently as 2017, that figure was 49 percent. In 2013, it was a majority, at 53 percent. NBC notes that “The eye-popping shift over the last 12 years comes against the backdrop of several major trends shaping the job market and the education world, from exploding college tuition prices to rapid changes in the modern economy.”
Trends show that younger voters were the first to pull back on their rosy view of higher education, but older Americans have since matched their skepticism. Even groups that once had the most positive views about the university system — women, minorities, Democrats, and college graduates themselves — no longer express the same enthusiasm. Fewer than half in these traditionally supportive blocs still view college as essential.
The economic case for college has weakened. The college wage premium is eroding, as high tuition and weaker earnings narrow the return. For over two decades, tuition has risen far faster than wages, deepening that gap.
Many colleges have watered down core requirements while adding more DEI coursework. Some reports find that two-thirds of schools now require courses in left-wing political dogma to graduate.
Author Patrick Deneen writes that today’s students, even at elite institutions, often leave school as “know-nothings,” possessing “brains largely empty” of the inheritance a liberal education once promised.
“They are the culmination of Western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture,” Deneen writes.
Economist Bryan Caplan argues that college today mostly signals obedience and persistence, not knowledge. A diploma shows employers you can follow rules and complete long tasks, but says little about what you actually learned.
As more people earn degrees, the signal weakens, leading employers to demand more advanced credentials and leaving many students with more debt but not much more knowledge.
For many on the right, none of this comes as a surprise. Conservatives may feel vindicated after years of warning that universities were shifting from scholarship to activism.
But to assume that the failure of today’s universities means universities themselves no longer matter would be a grave mistake. Abandoning universities altogether would destroy not only their woke excesses, but the vaults of learning that once guarded the West’s intellectual inheritance. It’s the proverbial risk of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
Any serious nation needs institutions that teach its history, debate its principles, and train citizens to think rather than react.
Our experiment in self-government grew out of a rare, even serendipitous, convergence of traditions: Christianity, the classical world, the common law, and the Enlightenment. Forget these foundations, and the country will quickly become unrecognizable, as every fallen republic eventually learns.
Universities were never meant to be primarily job-training centers; they preserved the political, scientific, and literary traditions that formed citizens capable of governing themselves. If universities collapse, we lose the knowledge and habits that teach people how to remain free.
At their best, universities should preserve a nation’s intellectual memory so faithfully that they serve as an informal check on government, remaining independent enough to remind the country when its leaders have drifted from their founding principles.
Repairing higher education requires changing incentives, not just course catalogs. The Supreme Court’s decision ending race-based admissions was one step toward restoring academic standards, but deeper reforms are needed.
Curricula must also return to fundamentals. That means prioritizing skills like reading, writing, STEM, and basic economics, while restoring serious survey courses in American history, the Western tradition, and constitutional self-government — the kind of curriculum only a handful of colleges still offer.
Federal subsidies also allow universities to raise prices without consequence. Ending those blank checks, or abolishing federal student aid altogether, would force colleges to compete, cut costs, and stop loading students with debt they may never repay.
Americans aren’t wrong to doubt today’s system. The polling is a rational verdict on decades of bad ideas and bad incentives. But if we simply cheer the collapse of higher education without building something better, we won’t just punish the “woke.” We’ll impoverish our own civilization.
A nation that forgets why it built universities in the first place will eventually forget why it built a republic — and will lose both.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
My niece went to the same (once fine) college from which her father and I graduated. Both of us considered it a place where intellectual capacity was enhanced. They turned my niece into a woke Culture Warrior who, upon graduation, declared her family to be White Privileged. She denounced us, claiming that we were racists (funny, because we’re all married to POCs and have high percentages of “brown-skinned” employees). Our perceived value of her “higher education”? ZERO. BTW…my brother and I mailed our diplomas back to our Alma Mater and demanded that they remove us from their Alumni money-donors call list.
Why would any THINKING person go into deep debt to attend a college which has TAs doing the teaching while the woke professors are out protesting? I can’t figure out why Harvard, Yale,, etc. are called “elite” schools. I wouldn’t send MY children there– all Woke BS and no real EDUCATION. Attend a trade school or do an apprenticeship!
Government backed loans turned higher education into a cash cow and removed all merit.
My son was considering whether or not to go for his PhD because he didn’t think he was “smart” enough – his mentor/advisor/friend,who himself had at least one PhD told my son, “Being smart has nothing to do with it, having the degree simply means that you stayed with the program long enough to have it awarded…besides, we both know some really stupid people with PhD’s.” One of my son’s uncles was a perfect example of this.
The cost of the two big universities in Arizona has escalated at an alarming rate the last 10 years. I don’t see how anyone but the high dollar earners ever pay for it especially when the kids get brain-washed more than educated. Unless a kid knows exactly what they want to study and is a good student who is mature enough to know how to achieve their goal, they can get lost in the “quagmire”. The government should not even be in the loan business for education. Everyone knows how adding the government into the college financing world has become a huge disaster. The less government runs, the better off we, the people are.
Higher education is nothing but indoctrination. If you want to become a Democrat go to college. They will brainwash you and you will come out a socialist Communist. Today young adults in college believe that is permissible to commit violence on someone that has an opinion other than your own. They don’t even know what a woman is. They are destined for failure at a huge price tag
If I had kids they’d be going to Trade School. That way they’d learn a real skill, and better equipped to live life. College is a scam .
These polls should surprise no one. The decades and decades of slow steady DECLINE in higher education has in the last couple of decades, become extremely rapid. This rapidly crumbling trend also includes almost all public schools in grades K-12. ALL of these disastrous declines in what used to be valuable learning experiences have been replaced by EXPENSIVE SOCIALISM-LOVING, AMERICA-HATING INDOCTRINATION.
The tragedy of this rapid decline can be solely blamed on Left-wing LIBERALISM (with greed, power, and money supporting it). And the main catalyst behind it all is driven and fueled by their intense HATRED for America, Christianity, Capitalism, and everything else she stands for).
Amen! The author is right on in her diagnosis of the higher education problem.
The local community colleges can still help students learn some life and future job skills, while not costing a fortune. I went back to UCSB in 1990 finish my BA and found the woke professors (I know, Santa Barbara, duh) to be engaged in serious brainwashing. Since I was 30 at the time, I decided to try to at least change a few young minds while I was there. When 2025 polls find that 90% of the academia supporting liberals and Democrats, we know all is lost. Some of these universities are ONLY surviving off foreign students and interest from their endowments. Legislation is needed to STOP foreign funding of our education system!
I went to a University and obtained several degrees but many majors at colleges and universities across the country currently do not provide degrees so that a college graduate can be employed. If I had to decide my future after high school in today’s world, I would pursue nursing or a trade. My son-in-law is a tradesman and earns a significantly higher income than most college graduates. My auto mechanic owns his own business, lives in a beautiful home, owns a Cessna airplane, and lives better than most college graduates. College degrees in engineer, business administration, education, law, nursing, medicine, and some of the sciences such as physics and chemistry are definitely needed but many degrees are not viable for employment. Perhaps the best solution is to let the colleges and universities continue in their self-destructive ways until young people choose not to attend these institutions. That will force higher education to change. It will be painful but there is probably no other way.
A higher education, what about basic education, it’s a joke, not funny one. The repair must start at the bottom, not the top, which is a result of the bottom.
Today’s universities and colleges are simply diploma mills that teach little but how to hate the U. S. A complete rethinking is absolutely necessary but it won’t come from inside the system, just as there is no way to fix the broken bureaucratic government systems from inside. External pressures are mandatory, but unlikely to come to fruition.
Yeah with
Debt
Indoc
tuition
dorms, books
parking & wont use endowments to improve college.
& only these degrees have Value:
Nursing
Medical
Eng
Business
Sciences
Physics
BioMed
Geology: Mining
Finances
All else trash & or go to Voc Tech Ed
When I went to college, we were still taught to think for ourselves, question everything and do the research and base our decisions on evidence, to discuss opinions freely without resorting to physical violence, or the silencing of those who did not agree with our personal opinion. Today’s institutes of higher indoctrination are not concerned with teaching students how to think for themselves but to merely regurgitate their professors’ opinions without questioning it, regardless of evidence, and to silence opposing views at any cost, i.e. the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The actual purpose of universities and science, the search for truth, is no longer their function. Why should we continue to base salaries and job functions based upon degrees achieved under those conditions, as it benefits no one to do so? Either we get a complete reform of our academic system, or we might as well remove accreditation from all these institutes of higher Marxist indoctrination.
We need to fix our Basic School education first. Kids coming out of HS can’t read, write or count change using basic math. STEM will get them headed in the right direction of the up and coming world. Career Technical Education (CTE) at the HS level will direct them to TRADE Schools where they will learn a viable valubale trade at minimal cost and be making 6 figure $$ within a year or 2 with most of them.
Also, get the government out of all education. Anything the government is involved with costs more.
The problem started when public schools stopped offering shop classes.
It was a place where students had ability to work with their hands and develop skills and learn a trade.
Our “institutes if higher learning” have become expensive indoctrination centers handing out useless degrees in pure BS which don’t translate into careers that will pay off the monumental debts they create. Blue collar jobs are where the money is- construction, electrical, plumbing – unfortunately, today’s youth expect to become instant millionaires while sitting at home playing video games
Until the schools go back to teaching grades k-12 “reading, writing and arithmetic” students need at least 2 year colleges learn what they should have known by 12th grade.
Also, schools are following the Prussian school model which is designed to produce mindless drones loyal to the state, that needs to be changed.
My kids both got degrees through the GI Blll so we or they didn’t have to pay for them. So now, one son has a part time job and the other just got out of the military. And both, of course, are left leaning. One has accused us of being racist and there’s not one shred of evidence for that. Just what his professors TOLD HIM…he believes. Sad it had to come to this in America…
.
The uproar and uprisings must begin on local levels with parents uniting in protest against inadequate intent, design and implementation of elementary educational programs. Otherwise, nothing will ever change.
This is a welcome trend. College degrees have been mostly useless for a long time, but people are starting to realize it. I got a master’s in teaching, but feel I learned more on the job than in school.
A college degree in certain fields is valuable. Basket weaving is not such a field. Make it STEM.
With the exception of the technical fields, so-called “Higher Education” is actually a program aimed at turning young minds to mush!
Are these the same Americans that keep saying they can’t read?
Here it is in a nutshell, when you allow foreign people and countries to buy our schools our companies guess what happens? Oh wait” we already know this. Long term political nut jobs who have been bought off. Wow their even rich, how the hell did that happen? Oh well we already know. When their is a law that one entity owns one thing and no competition it is called a monopoly that is against the law. It was created when Randolph Hearst had a American news control of almost every news outlet in america and was a supporter of Hitler. Hence the law against a monopoly. WAKE UP AMERICA WE ARE CLOSE TO COMMUNIST NATION AS YOU CAN GET.
Higher education establishments have become more of an indoctrination medium than a place of useful education. They have also become a money leech, feeding on tax money via the student loan scam that is saddling untold numbers of students with debt they may never be able to repay. I am shocked and amazed at the scope of corruption emanating through Washington these days.
Although NOBLE, the author NEGLECTS to acknowledge the VALUE of TRADE/VOCATIONAL schools which instill a REAL-WORLD classical WORK ETHIC at LESS cost and RETURN on investment’.
Just ASK Mike Rowe.
It’s not just a matter of the horrendous COST of a college education. It’s that many conservative, godly parents are watching their solidly faith-filled young people being indoctrinated – often by the Thanksgiving break – into godless, evil doctrines on too many campuses in America. The liberal professors, as well as the influence of the student environment, are having a highly negative impact on students who WERE committed to their faith and respected the core values and history of America’s past. Today, I would be loath to send my college student to ANY public college/university.
Maybe a financial correction would bring these universities back to reality. That is why Pres Trumps, desire to prop up this poorly run, inept schools, by bringing in 600K more Chinese students along with the hundreds of other foreign student, is a really bad idea.
When my son had to take bowling in his first year of college, that began my thoughts on the college system.
In my quest to be the best registered nurse I could be I found out that the ADN (Associate Degree) taught me the most practical nursing skills. I felt my BSN prepared me fairly well to be a supervisor but did not prepare me to be a hands on nurse as well as the ADN program did. I believe most BSN nurses caught up to the ADN skill level after a year or two of hands on experience if they wanted to be a good bedside nurse.(Most did) BSNs knew what to do, they just didn’t have the experience early on as the ADN did. The MSN (Masters) gave me no hands on experience but introduced me to upper management skills, education, research, technical and some programs were based on advance clinical skills in specific areas. The PhD was mostly a title.
Although you can sit the NCLEX board certification to be an RN with either a ADN or a BSN and unfortunately with a MSN with no actual clinical experience. ( Although thankfully that was rare). The pay scale and opportunity for advancement and better pay is higher with each level ADN – BSN – Masters. So, it some fields education has purpose. But, unlike most fields once you graduate and pass the NCLEX, you can start working as an RN after orientation to the facility that hired you. And believe me there are facilities that want to hire you.
We need to replace an inexcusably expensive Liberal Arts education with a fiscally conservatively priced Conservative Arts education!