Americans losing faith in higher education

Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? 

NYT 

For most people, the new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet. 

By Paul Tough

Paul Tough is a contributing writer for the magazine who has written several books on inequality in education.

A decade or so ago, Americans were feeling pretty positive about higher education. Public-opinion polls in the early 2010s all told the same story. In one survey, 86 percent of college graduates said that college had been a good investment; in another, 74 percent of young adults said a college education was “very important”; in a third, 60 percent of Americans said that colleges and universities were having a positive impact on the country. Ninety-six percent of parents who identified as Democrats said they expected their kids to attend college — only to be outdone by Republican parents, 99 percent of whom said they expected their kids to go to college. 

In the fall of 2009, 70 percent of that year’s crop of high school graduates did in fact go straight to college. That was the highest percentage ever, and the collegegoing rate stayed near that elevated level for the next few years. The motivation of these students was largely financial. The 2008 recession devastated many of the industries that for decades provided good jobs for less-educated workers, and a college degree had become a particularly valuable commodity in the American labor market. The typical American with a bachelor’s degree (and no further credential) was earning about two-thirds more than the typical high school grad, a financial advantage about twice as large as the one a college degree produced a generation earlier. College seemed like a reliable runway to a life of comfort and affluence. 

A decade later, Americans’ feelings about higher education have turned sharply negative. The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Only about a third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And in contrast to the college-focused parents of a decade ago, now almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college. 

The numbers on campus have shifted as well. In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021. As recently as 2016, 70 percent of high school graduates were still going straight to college; now the figure is 62 percent. 

Outside the United States, meanwhile, higher education is more popular than ever. Our global allies and competitors have spent the last couple of decades racing to raise their national levels of educational attainment. In Britain, the number of current undergraduates has risen since 2016 by 12 percent. (Over the same period, the American figure fell by 8 percent.) In Canada, 67 percent of adults between 25 and 34 are graduates of a two- or four-year college, about 15 percentage points higher than the current American attainment rate. 

Britain and Canada are not the outliers on this point; we are. On average, countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have increased their college-degree attainment rate among young adults by more than 20 percentage points since 2000, and 11 of those countries now have better-educated labor forces than we do, including not only economic powerhouses like Japan and South Korea and Britain but also smaller competitors like the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland. Americans have turned away from college at the same time that students in the rest of the world have been flocking to campus. Why? What changed in the last decade to make a college education — and higher education as an institution — so unappealing to so many Americans? 

When it comes to higher education worldwide, the United States is an outlier in more ways than one. In Canada and Japan, public-university tuition is now about $5,000 a year. In Italy, Spain and Israel, it’s about $2,000. In France, Denmark and Germany, it’s essentially zero. A few decades ago, the same thing was true in the United States; government funding covered much of the cost of public college. Now students and their families bear much of the burden, and that fact has changed what used to be a pretty straightforward calculation about the economic value of college into a complex math problem. 

. . . . 

When you do take cost and debt into account, the financial benefits of college begin to look quite different. Douglas Webber, who was a professor at Temple University until he joined the Federal Reserve Board last year as a senior economist, has spent the last decade looking for new ways to calculate the value of a college degree. For Americans in the aggregate, he has found, the college wage premium remains robust. On average, more education still means more income. What has changed, he has written, is that the premium now varies much more than it used to among individuals and groups: The “downside risk” to enrolling in college, he argues, has become “nontrivial.” When you look at Webber’s data, higher education no longer resembles a safe, reliable blue-chip investment, like buying a Treasury bill. It’s now more like going to a casino. It’s a gamble that can still sometimes produce a big windfall, but it can also bring financial disaster. 

. . . . 

Last month, Webber and a colleague published some new research that identified the people who are making out the worst at the casino: students who borrow money to attend college but don’t graduate. In Federal Reserve surveys, half the borrowers who didn’t finish their degrees said they were “just getting by” or “finding it difficult to get by.” Two-thirds said they would have a hard time coming up with $400 to cover an unexpected expense. Financially, they were not only doing much worse than college graduates; they were doing worse than adults who had never gone to college at all. For these former students, the college wage premium had turned upside down.

. . . .

When pollsters ask Republicans to expand on why they’ve turned against college, the answer generally has to do with ideology. In a Pew survey published in 2019, 79 percent of Republicans said a major problem in higher education was professors’ bringing their political and social views into the classroom. Only 17 percent of Democrats agreed. In a 2017 Gallup poll, the No. 1 reason Republicans gave for their declining faith in higher ed was that colleges had become “too liberal/political.”…. 

(continue reading)