College may be less worth it than it was in the past, some experts say.
And there’s an increasing number of people wondering whether a college education really is worth the time, money, and effort, says Jackson Carpenter, founder of the Cultural Currents Institute (CCI), a marketing group that investigates and works to shape trends in public opinion.
Analysis of research into a range of factors suggests that “college is worth it in a few select circumstances,” Mr. Carpenter said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
“If you’re looking to get into a highly technical field, or if you have access to a school that will give you access to the highest-paying, most-elite jobs with the best possible network,” a college education can be beneficial, he said.
It also can be a good option if “it’s already being paid for by someone else,” he said.
But public opinion seems to be shifting, he said.
Many Americans have seen a college education as a guarantee of landing a good job, financial security, useful knowledge, and valuable connections. Now, they’re not so sure, it seems.
The trend of questioning if college is worth it started in 2004, Mr. Carpenter said. It ramped up during the 2008 recession and again through the pandemic, his firm’s research suggests.
Government statistics show that from 2007 to today, the amount of student debt in America tripled, going from $516 billion to $1.5 trillion. In the same time frame, college graduation rate has increased sixfold, Mr. Carpenter said.
However, in the past 40 years, statistics show real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—haven’t gone up, he said.
Effectively, college students are paying more now for their education and getting less opportunity, he said.
Degrees that Pay Off
Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, agrees that, for some, college isn’t worth the cost.For many, it just isn’t the road to opportunity that it was in the past, he told The Epoch Times.
But, he added, there are still circumstances that make higher education worth it.
“If you go to college [and] if you’re going to a school that’s not charging outrageous amounts [and] if you graduate on time, and if you major in a field that has some labor market relevance, like engineering, or nursing, or economics, or business, you’re probably going to get a return on your investment,” Mr. Cooper said.
Students who fail to meet all of these criteria in their college experience may be worse off financially because they went to college, he said.
“If you just compare the average wage that a college graduate gets to the average wage that a high school graduate gets, the college graduate is earning quite a bit more,” Mr. Cooper said. “But the problem with looking at averages is that you’re masking a lot of the variation.”
The best college majors for earning money are ones that can lead directly into jobs, he said. Those, he said, include computer science, nursing, economics, business, political science, and some social sciences.
Degrees in psychology, philosophy, arts, music, and the humanities often don’t pay off, he said.
Less Assistance for Workforce Training
Federal funding for college has encouraged this overproduction of graduates, Mr. Cooper said.“If you want to go to a traditional four-year college campus, you can get a lot of money from the federal government,” he said.
“But if you want to go to a workforce training program, the funding streams available to you are going to be a lot more limited, both at the federal and state levels.”
If students are passionate about devoting their lives to a field with more graduates and fewer jobs, Mr. Cooper said he wouldn’t discourage them. But if they’re not set on one of those professions, they'd be wise to pursue a more marketable degree, he said.
Mr. Cooper and Mr. Carpenter both said the supply of college graduates has risen so much that employers have raised their college-degree requirements for new hires, without raising salaries.
And that’s created a “world where we’re running faster just to stay in place,” Mr. Cooper said.
Another drawback for some students is that increased radicalism by the political left-leaning culture on many campuses has made college an unappealing choice for many conservatives, he said.
But it’s not just one side of the political spectrum now questioning whether college is worth it.
Education Arms Race
Employers used to view college diplomas as a signal that job applicants were smart, hardworking, and motivated, Mr. Carpenter said. That logic held in a world where only a small group of talented people got into college, he said.In 1965, about 5.92 million Americans enrolled in college, according to Statista, an international research platform. That same year, America had a population of 199 million, the company found. That means 2.9 percent were students in higher education.
In 2020, about 19.02 million of the country’s 331 million residents were attending college, Statista found. That would represent 5.7 percent of the U.S. population.
Today, 36 percent of Americans have attended college at some point, according to U.S. Census figures.
“If you want to go to college, you can go to college,” Mr. Carpenter said. “You can find a school that will accept you and will take your money.”
In some ways, college has become the new high school, Mr. Carpenter said. And when everyone has higher education, students find themselves in an education arms race for even more impressive degrees.
“What you end up with is this highly overqualified workforce without a lot of real experience” and soaring student debt, he said.
But college doesn’t have to be this expensive for students, Mr. Carpenter said. “It hasn’t always cost us this much to educate our college graduates.”
He blames schools that fund an expanding, non-essential bureaucracy.
Yet, despite their increased operating costs, the quality of education offered by colleges may have decreased, Mr. Carpenter said. So students pay more to get less from education, he said.
The high cost of education and lingering debt also can make some college graduates less adaptable to a changing economy, Mr. Carpenter said.
“If you have invested potentially six figures into an education and you have a lot of debt to show for it, to then go work in a field not related to your education feels a lot harder,” he said.
Even the cultural component of college isn’t as valuable anymore, he said.
Colleges were once viewed as cultural centers that connected young people with new ideas.
But now, “instead of folks looking to their college education to inform their culture, they’re looking to groups of influencers and institutions that exist online,” and with whom they can connect and align, he said.
Mr. Carpenter hopes businesses will begin to shift more toward an apprenticeship model so young people can learn a trade. And parents, he said, should teach children to identify and pursue opportunities, rather than automatically pushing them toward college.
“My generation was raised with this narrative that if you follow the rules, follow the path set out in front of you, get a degree in anything, you’re gonna get a good job,” Mr. Carpenter said.
But clearly, he said, college isn’t always the best choice.
