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.
