May 19, 2024 by Philip Lewenstein

Despite Doubts, Higher Education Is Worth It But Needs Change

More than 50 years ago, I began working for the Minnesota Higher Education Coordinating Commission, a state agency charged with planning for and coordinating postsecondary education. It was an exciting time as the state was pursuing and implementing its goal of providing access to and choice of opportunities for students and families.

Higher education, spurred by the post-World War II GI Bill and pursuit of the American dream by baby boomers, had been growing dramatically. College was viewed as a public good, a valuable investment benefiting both students and society.

Minnesota’s focus was on providing financial and geographic access. The state created an array of grant, loan, work-study, and interstate tuition reciprocity programs to help students and families pay for college. And the state sought to make institutions available within a reasonable distance for its citizens.

State policy was for the cost of higher education to be shared by the state and students. State appropriations would cover two-thirds of the cost, and student tuition would provide the remaining third. Later, a shared responsibility policy was adopted for state grants, apportioning responsibility for paying the last third among students, families, and government.

In previous blogs, I discussed the value of college in view of the large family investment required, burgeoning student debt, foregone earnings, and the shortage of employment opportunities commensurate with the level of education completed ( “Rethinking the Value of Higher Education: It Is Still Worth It, and It Matters,” June 24, 2018, www.philsfocus.com).

Six years ago, I stated my continuing belief that higher education is worth the investment, and it matters for both individuals and society. It remains our family’s leading value. Higher education provides the foundation for our ability to generate new ideas and knowledge, to think critically, to deal with change, to meet challenges, to overcome adversity, to appreciate diversity, and to support active, not passive, citizens and consumers.

Yet in recent years, particularly, public confidence in higher education has waned, leading to a reexamination of the value and worth of the enterprise. Over the years, states spent less of their total budgets on higher education compared to spending on other services.

Public colleges went on unfettered spending sprees (“State Colleges ‘Devour’ Money and Students Foot the Bill,” by Melissa Korn, Andrea Fuller, and Jennifer S. Forsyth, August 11, 2023, The Wall Street Journal), and the price of attendance skyrocketed. Enrollments grew and then declined. Old barriers to college persist while new ones emerge. Students increasingly seek alternatives to traditional degrees.

However, despite increasing doubts about the value of higher education, I continue to believe that higher education is and will continue to be worth the investment if it accepts and addresses valid criticisms, adapts to change, and better articulates its purposes.

Author Bunch Lays out College Problem

I was motivated to reconsider the worth of college after reading After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics,2022)by Will Bunch, author and national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Bunch says that the American dream of college “has morphed into a nightmare.” He looks at how the American way of college went off the rails.

“All those modern ailments—the unfathomable tuition bills, the massive student debt that collectively has risen to $1.7 trillion (or more as the nation owes on credit cards), and the elite schools with the single-digit admission rates that today resemble luxury spa hotels more than the academies of learning, the growing number of middle-class kids forced to eat from food pantries or even experience the homelessness of a desperate chase for college credentials—have had profound consequences extending far off campus.”

Our current conversation about the “college problem” doesn’t cover half of it, Bunch says. “Even if we adopt a vision of free public universities that also wipes away most or even all of that student debt, these fixes will only work for the roughly half of Americans attending—or at least trying to attend college,” Bunch says.

Bunch argues that a few academics were doing yeoman’s work about the college problem of the 21^st century but missing the connection of America’s political breakdown. The United States needs a better, different conversation about fixing all the pathways into adulthood, and understanding how we got there is the first step, he writes.

“Something broke in this country, somewhere after the 1960s—when our leaders, amid a moral panic that maybe kids today were learning just a little too much about democratic values, convinced their voters that college really isn’t a public good, and that universal higher education would no longer be a national goal,” Bunch says.

“Instead they created a privatized regime with a diploma as a gold ticket for just a third of America’s young people, and they called this arguably rigged system a ‘meritocracy’—thus telling the other two thirds, who dropped out when they eyeballed the bill, or simply weren’t cut out to start their twenties inside a classroom, that obviously lacked merit.

“And these decision-makers shrugged at the consequences—how the anger over the brutal sorting that would breed resentment and even hatred, and how it would change not only who people voted for, but how they treated their neighbors.”

Confidence in Higher Education Declines as Alternatives Gain Favor

Several surveys and studies in the past year have documented the declining confidence in higher education as well as increased interest in alternative pathways for students.

A Gallup poll last summer found that Americans’ confidence in higher education is continuing to decline—a troubling sign that could foreshadow further erosion of colleges’ enrollment, funding, and stature (“Public Trust in Higher Ed Has Plummeted. Yet Again,” by Zachary Schermele, July 11, 2023, The Chronicle of Higher Education).

The poll shows that only 36% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, down about 20 percentage points from eight years ago.

“The numbers are the latest indication—and a stark one—of higher ed’s image problem,” Schermele wrote. “Polling in recent years has documented a widening of distrust of post-secondary education among broad swaths of the general public, as partisan debates over the value of a college degree have intensified, the cost to enroll has risen, and student-loan debt has ballooned into a crisis.”

The Gallup findings are broadly consistent with a March 2023 Wall Street Journal-NORC survey that found just 42% of respondents thought college was worth the cost because it improves career prospects (“1in 3 Americans are confident in higher ed, as Republicans and Americans without a degree sour in particular,” by Rick Seltzer, Chronicle Daily Briefing, July 11, 2023).

The survey found that 56% of Americans agree with the statement “A four-year college education is not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”

The findings are consistent with other Gallup polling that shows a larger crisis of confidence that Americans are feeling about institutions, including the military, banks, and the health-care industry, Schermele said.

In fact, more high-school graduates are being diverted from college campuses by brighter prospects for blue-collar jobs in a historically strong labor market for less-educated workers (“More High-School Grads Forgo College,” by Harriet Torry, May 30, 2023, The Wall Street Journal).

“The college enrollment rate for recent U.S. high-school graduates, ages 16 to 24, fell to 62% from 66.2% in 2019, just before the pandemic began, according to Labor Department data,” Torry wrote. “The rate topped out at 70.1% in 2009.”

Torry explains that some young people are pursuing other forms of job training. The number of apprentices has increased by more than 50%, she says, citing federal data and the Urban Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank.

Adding fuel to the debate over the value of a college education are the results of a recent study showing that about half of college graduates end up in jobs where their degrees aren’t needed, and that underemployment has lasting implications for their earnings and career paths (“Half of College Grads Are Underemployed,” by Vanessa Fuhrmans and Lindsay Ellis, February 24-25, 2024, The Wall Street Journal).

Most of the graduates who held noncollege jobs a year after leaving college remained underemployed a decade later, according to researchers at labor analytics firm Burning Glass Institute and nonprofit Strada Education Foundation.

Meanwhile, there is a newfound hunger for skills with more employers dropping the college degree requirement for jobs, says Jenny Anderson (“How America Started to Fall Out of Love with College Degrees,” April 3, 2023, Time).

“We’ve gone from pursuing the American Dream to pursuing more doing, perhaps because the act of doing different things helps us better understand what kind of work we want to do,” Anderson writes.

Although college is a valuable pathway for many careers, not everyone needs to spend two or four years studying, Anderson says. “Students’ interests vary widely, and their flourishing will require more recognition by all of us that human variation is a feature and not a bug.”

Anderson notes that the alternatives now available for learning and training are far richer than they used to be with a wider variety of providers and credentials.

“Too many Americans cannot afford the time it takes to get a degree, or the astronomical price tag of it,” Anderson says. “Affordability and employment are the top priorities for Americans when it comes to higher education.

“The U.S.’s mistake was not in lionizing higher education, which is a noble pursuit, but in stigmatizing the alternatives. In Germany and Switzerland, half to nearly two thirds of students pursue vocational education. Classroom education does not end, but changes.”

Covid offered a rethinking of priorities, Anderson writes. What’s an education for?

“If it’s to prepare for meaningful work, and meaningful lives, an arms race toward college, affordable only for the elite, is not a sustainable way forward,” she says. “Young people are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis, the result of a global pandemic, a burning planet, and the ubiquity of brain-addling technology.

“We should offer them a broader set of opportunities and pathways to realize their future selves—including, but not extolling, the college degree.”

For three generations, the national aspiration to “college for all” shaped America’s economy and culture, as most high-school graduates took it for granted that they would earn a degree; however, that consensus is now collapsing in the face of massive student debt, underemployed degree-holders, and political intolerance on campus, according to Douglas Belkin of The Wall Street Journal (“Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College,” January 20-21, 2024).

Belkin notes that if the pandemic marked the moment the “college for all” model finally cracked, 1965 marked its birth.

“As the baby boomers came of age, the federal government made loans available to any college-bound 18-year-old with a high-school diploma in order to maintain the most educated workforce in the world,” Belkin writes. “High school scrapped vocational education programs in favor of college prep classes.”

The digital revolution “demanded a nimble realignment of the academy so that students could learn a quickly emerging set of skills to meet changing labor-market demands,” Belkin says. “Instead of adapting, campus interest groups protected their turf.”

University governance was designed for an analog era, Belkin notes. “Decisions are sifted through a slow, deliberative process until faculty, administrators, and trustees reach consensus,” he says. “The genius of the system is that it avoids the strictures of top-down control and protects academic freedom against political interference. The weakness is that it is a recipe for stagnation.”

Belkin says that the misalignment between universities and the labor market is compounded by the failure of many schools to teach students to think critically. Many students arrive poorly prepared for college-level work, and the universities are ill-equipped to provide intensive classroom instruction. Further, he adds, professors compete for tenure based on the quality of their research and publishing record; teaching is mostly an afterthought.

Chronicle Explores Public Perception Problem

The Chronicle of Higher Education refers to the drop in confidence as higher education’s public perception problem. Last summer, The Chronicle began a project to examine the problem. The project includes an independent national survey conducted by the Chronicle with Langer Research Associates.

Americans believe in the value of a college credential, but they are unconvinced that higher education is fulfilling its promise to society (“What the Public Really Thinks about Higher Education,” by Eric Kelderman, September 5, 2023, The Chronicle of Higher Education).

The poll found that most people, whether they have a four-year degree or not, would advise others to pursue one. However, many don’t think institutions do a great job of educating their students—or that they are of great public benefit to graduates.

“Alternatives like trade school strike many Americans as just as good a path to a successful livelihood,” Kelderman aid. “And colleges’ value to communities and to society also draws skepticism.”

Survey respondents reflect partisan divides. In many cases, Republicans and conservatives express deep reservations about higher education, while Democrats and liberals are mostly supportive.

“But taken as a whole, the survey draws an important distinction,” Kelderman says. “People view higher education as an important means for individual attainment, but not necessarily for the greater good.”

Almost 80% of people with a college degree say the cost is worth it. Seventy-eight percent of respondents would recommend that a close friend or a relative pursue a bachelor’s degree.

Overall, however, respondents gave higher education middling grades on how well it was spreading the benefit around, Kelderman reports. Less than a third of people think colleges are doing an excellent or very good job of leveling the playing field for success in society. A similar share say colleges are falling short on that measure.

Perhaps the survey’s most alarming finding is that the public is far from convinced that colleges excel at their core mission of educating students, Kelderman says. Even graduates are not sold. Forty percent of respondents said colleges are excellent or very good at educating students, and nearly 20% said they were not so good on that measure.

Benefits for Earning Degree Remain Solid

Despite declining confidence in higher education, both the economic and noneconomic benefits for earning a college degree remain solid, according to a Lumina-Gallup study (“Higher Education Linked to Greater Wellbeing, Job Fit, and Societal Progress, Lumina-Gallup Study Finds,” August 30, 2023, Gallup Inc.).

College graduates earn about $1 million more on average over their working years than U.S. adults with no college degree. Moreover, the study results show that additional years of education beyond high school make for healthier, more civic-minded individuals who are more likely to interact with neighbors and family members and find careers that align with their natural talents and interests.

An analysis from the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce (CEW) indicates that by 2031, 72% of jobs in the United States will require postsecondary education and training (“Degrees Will Increasingly Dominate Job Growth in US, Defying Decline in Public Trust in Higher Education, Georgetown University Report Says,” November 16, 2023, Center on Education and the Workforce).

CEW researchers project that the U.S. will have 171 million jobs in 2031, an increase of 16 million net new jobs from 2021. During that period, the analysis suggests there will be 18.5 million job openings per year on average, and some 12.5 million of these annual openings will require at least some higher education.

The CEW report, After Everything: Projections of Jobs, Education and Training Requirements through 2031, includes a national overview of job projections and their educational requirements across industries, occupational clusters, and detailed occupational groups.

The projections demonstrate the central role that postsecondary education plays in preparing the workforce of the future, even though young people increasingly doubt the value of a college degree.

“We’ve seen waves of this in the past, but the growing doubt about the value of a college degree is alarming,” said CEW director and lead author Anthony P. Carnevale. “Couple the influx of infrastructure jobs with politicians on both sides saying people don’t need degrees, and you get a generation of young people who think college isn’t necessary.

“But our findings show, once again, that postsecondary education and training has become the threshold requirement for access to middle-class status and earnings. It is no longer the preferred pathway to middle-class jobs; it is increasingly the only pathway.”

Research from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) found that more than 80% of employers surveyed said they believe higher education prepares college graduates for workforce success—though some executives find students lack certain skills (“Employers value a college degree but think students lack some skills,” by Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, November 30, 2023, Higher Ed Dive).

Only 49% of employers reported thinking that graduates are very prepared in oral communication, but about 80% said they agreed graduates overall are ready for the workplace. More than 80% of respondents agreed that securing a college degree is worthwhile, even with the associated costs. Only 18% disagreed with that sentiment.

A Columbia University Teachers College report in July 2023 showed that most Americans (69%) view public spending on higher education as an excellent or good investment, and that a majority of Americans recognize the positive contribution of colleges and universities to individuals and society (“American higher education widely viewed as a worthwhile investment benefitting individuals and society,” by Noah D. Drezner and Oren Pizmoney-Levy).

Despite doubts about the value of college, a majority of degree students and graduates say the education is worth the cost and is important.

Seventy-one percent of enrolled bachelor’s degree students nationally strongly agree or agree that the degree they are receiving is worth the cost, and 8% strongly disagree or disagree, according to a Gallup poll last year (“Current College Students Say Their Degree Is Worth the Cost,” by Stephanie Marken and Zach Hrynowski, June 1, 2023, Gallup).

The majority of college students nationally, 75%, strongly agree or agree their institution is preparing them well for life outside college while 6% strongly disagree or disagree.

Despite the rise in stopping out of college and declining enrollments, nearly 75% of adults say a  degree (two or four years) is now equally (35%) or more important (39%) in securing a successful career than it was 20 years ago (“Nearly Half of College Dropouts Would Reenroll if Loans Were Forgiven, Lumina-Gallup Study Finds,” May 3, 2023, Gallup).

In a 2023 Harris Poll survey of 2023 graduates, nine of ten said they’re glad that they went to college (“90% of 2023 graduates think college is really worth it,” by Tim Killeen and Will Johnson, June 9, 2023, yahoo!finance). The same majority agreed that a degree is the best way for someone to secure their future.

This Harris survey found that 95% of graduates of two-year, four-year, and graduate programs are excited about their postgraduate plans. Killeen is president of the University of Illinois System, and Johnson is CEO of the Harris Poll.

A majority of Generation Z (83%) in the United States say that a college education today is “very important” or “fairly important,” according to data from the Gallup and Walton Family Foundation-State of American Youth Survey (“Majority of Gen Z Consider College Education Important,” by Tara P. Nicola, September 14, 2023, Gallup). Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z, defined for the study as people aged 12 to 26, think a college education is very important.

“The favorable perception of higher education among Gen Z is noteworthy given that, among U.S. adults more generally, concern about college affordability remains high and confidence in higher education is low,” Nicola says.

Even in a degree-optional world, it’s a mistake for students and their parents to think that college isn’t necessary, say authors Jeffrey Selingo and Matt Sigelman (“Yes, a College Degree Is Still Worth It,” May 20-21, 2023, The Wall Street Journal).

They completed a study that found the four-year degree is still a valuable commodity, delivering an immediate 25% wage premium within a year of graduation—a difference that held steady over the 12-year period studied.

Selingo and Sigelman also found that having a degree makes it easier for graduates to recover from early career struggles, allowing those who are “underemployed” to move up more easily into jobs in which more of their coworkers have a degree.

Selingo is author of Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions and a special adviser and professor of practice at Arizona State University. Sigelman is president of the Burning Glass Institute and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Project on the Workforce.

Barriers Continue to Affect Participation, Views of Higher Education

Several barriers are affecting students’ participation in postsecondary education. Affordability often tops the list but other factors are increasingly noted: mental health concerns, academic shortcomings, and the political divide. 

A newly released Gallup and Lumina report reveals that 75% of Americans believe that a bachelor’s degree is “extremely” or “very” valuable, but cost is a major deterrent for many who wish to attain a degree or credential (“Cost of College Affects Enrollment Choices, Impacts Major Life Events,” April 17, 2024, Gallup).

More than half (56%) of unenrolled adults say cost is a “very” important reason they are not pursuing education after high school, according to the report, Cost of College: The Price Tag of Higher Education and Its Effect on Enrollment.

Not only is cost discouraging people from enrolling, but it is stopping students from completing their programs as well, the report says. Thirty-one percent of enrolled adults have considered stopping their coursework within the last three months because of the cost of attendance.

Many Americans do not know the true cost of a degree, the report notes. Among all adults, about half underestimate the cost of a bachelor’s degree by $5,000 or more, and an additional 31% overestimate costs by the same margin.

The survey shows that the cost is forcing 38% of undergraduates to plunge deep into debt. For those borrowers, the financial burden can persist long after graduation or stopping out.

Seventy-one percent of currently or previously enrolled student borrowers report delaying at least one significant life event, such as purchasing a home (29%) or a car (28%) because of their student debt. Even relatively small student loans cause people to pause parts of their life. And 35% of students who stopped out of college say that loans prevent them from returning to complete their degree or credential.

Almost half the adults who didn’t complete their post-high-school education programs say they would likely reenroll if some or all their student loans were forgiven (47%), according to a Gallup-Lumina report last year. On average, these adults would need at least 70% of their loans forgiven to reenroll (“Nearly Half of College Dropouts Would Reenroll If Loans Were Forgiven, Lumina-Gallup Study Finds,” May 3, 2023, Gallup).

A new study (“How America Completes College 2024,” conducted by Ipsos) from student loan provider Sallie Mae finds that a quarter of current college students are at risk of stopping out or being dismissed from their institution with the primary concern the cost of tuition (“Report: Cost of College, Stress Pushes Students to Consider Stopping Out,” by Ashley Mowreader, April 18, 2024, Inside Higher Education).

First-generation students, students from low-income families, and students from community colleges were at the highest risk of considering leaving college or facing a dismissal, the report said.

In a survey by EAB, a consulting firm focused on higher education, students cited concerns about academic preparation, mental health, and affordability, with many saying college isn’t worth it (“Why students Opt Not to Enroll,” by Scott Jaschik, June 12, 2023, Inside Higher Education).

One in five high school students who said they won’t enroll in college cited their doubts about the value of college, up from 8% in 2019. The report summarizes results of a new survey of more than 20,000 high school students—those whose college-going behaviors have been influenced by the pandemic.

More than one in five, 22%, said they have decided to opt out because they are not mentally ready, a sharp increase from prepandemic levels, 14%, in 2019, Jaschik wrote—an especially prevalent view among first-generation and lower-income students.

Twenty-six percent of students surveyed selected “whether I’ll be successful in college” as a top concern behind only concerns related to affordability and value.

Mental health is increasingly a major issue for prospective and currently enrolled students.

About three in five undergraduates cited personal mental health as a reason they considered stopping their coursework in the last six months, according to a study last year by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation (“Mental health and stress are reasons for undergraduates stopping coursework, according to new Gallup-Lumina study,” March 23, 2023, Gallup).

The report, Stressed out and Stopping out: The Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education, found that of all factors, emotional stress ranked highest for undergraduates (69%) followed by personal mental health reasons (59%). Both items exceeded the next most selected reasons, including program cost (36%) and difficulty of coursework (27%).

One of the barriers to overcome is the deepening political divide in higher education. The culture wars are breaking public universities into polarized camps, reports Nick Anderson (“Political polarization is sorting colleges into red and blue schools,” April 3, 2023, The Washington Post).

“At stake is who goes to college, whether those students feel welcome on campus, and who decides what gets taught there,” Anderson wrote. “If, as a result, more prospective students gravitate to what they perceive to be politically like-minded colleges, analysts say that could produce a vicious cycle of division.”

Higher education officials often struggle to navigate culture-war battles that can affect how much money they get from legislatures and how effectively they can recruit out-of-state students, Anderson notes.

Traditional shields such as the tenure system and the commitment to academic freedom could be weakening in some Republican-led states, Anderson says. Republicans say they want more ideological balance on faculties and less leftist indoctrination of students.

Many universities pledged to improve the climate for marginalized groups after the killing of George Floyd by starting initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Liberals, in favor of the commitments, contend that racial privileges and biases must be thoroughly understood, acknowledged, and addressed while conservatives argue that colleges should be more race-blind and that any other course is inherently “discriminatory,” Anderson says.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has been tracking legislation that would prohibit colleges from having diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or staff; ban mandatory diversity training; forbid institutions to use diversity statements in hiring and promotion; or bar colleges from considering race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in admission or employment (“DEI: Legislation Tracker,” by Chronicle staff, March 1, 2024).

Eighty-one bills have been introduced in 28 states and Congress since 2023, according to the Chronicle. Eight have final legislative approval, eight have become law, and 27 have been tabled, failed to pass, or vetoed.

Since January 2023, at least 116 public colleges have altered or killed  jobs, practices, and programs that aim to advance diversity and inclusion, according to a new Chronicle database tracking the influence of Republican-backed anti-DEI bills that have proliferated the past 15 months (“Daily Briefing: How colleges are undoing DEI,” by Laura Krantz, April 16, 2024).

“The new resource reveals a confusing, inconsistent landscape, as institutions take vastly different approaches to mounting political pressure,” Krantz says.

A study last year found that nearly a fourth of high school seniors said they passed up, out of political concern, a college they would have initially considered because of its state, a trend that is evident among conservatives and liberals (“The Role of Politics in Where Students Want to Go to College,” by Scott Jaschik, March 27, 2023, Inside Higher Education).

The study from the Art & Science Group found that 91% of prospective college students in Florida disagree with the education policies of Governor Ron De Santis, a Republican, and one in eight graduating high-school students in Florida won’t attend a public college there due to his education policies.

A new poll suggests that state laws on abortion and guns may affect students’ choices of where to attend college (“Abortion and Gun Laws Matter in College Choice, a New Study Finds,” by Karin Fischer, March 14, 2024, The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Eighty-one percent of current and prospective students said campus gun policies could influence their college decisions, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2023 State of Higher Education Survey, Fischer reports.

Seven in ten students said state laws on reproductive health could be a factor in their enrollment decisions, with 38% calling access to such care highly important—an increase from the previous year.

Poor leadership poses another barrier. About 60% of respondents in a December 2023 poll reported that higher education leaders are failing students rather than developing them, and that one of the barriers is that they themselves are not good examples of leaders (“Poll: Americans Have Lost Faith in University Leaders,” by Lauren Camera, December 12, 2023, U.S. News & World Report).

Nearly 80% of Americans surveyed in the U.S. News-Harris Poll say that higher education institutions are more worried about their endowment than creating leaders of tomorrow, and more than 60% believe they are prioritizing donors, press, and other external factors over students.

The biggest problem, about 80% say, is that if colleges and universities don’t become more accessible to all people and emphasize diversity, then leaders of tomorrow will all be the same.

Survey data this spring suggest that prospective learners are being dissuaded from college by skepticism about whether degrees are worth the time and money (“Doubts About Value Are Deterring College Enrollment,” by Jessica Blake, March 13, 2024, Inside Higher Education).

The new report, based on data collected in 2023 was conducted by Edge Research, a marketing research firm, and HCM Strategists, a public policy and advocacy consulting firm, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The study used focus groups and parallel national surveys of current high-school students and of adults who decided to leave college or who didn’t go at all.

The majority of respondents from both age groups still see the benefits of gaining a two-or four-year college degree, the study found. But when compared to results from last year, the rates of perceived importance went down across the board—some by as much as six percentage points. Nonenrolled adults were generally about 10 percentage points less likely to have confidence in the benefits of a college degree than high schoolers were.

Just as confidence in the value of two-and four-year degrees declined, the perceived value of on-the-job-training as well as shorter-term licensure or certificate programs rose. While 58% of high schoolers and 51% of nonenrolled adults in 2023 believed you must have a college degree to earn a “good job,” 69% and 65%, respectively, believed a certification was enough.

Higher Education Resists Change

A widespread problem within higher education is resistance to change, says Brian Rosenberg, president emeritus of Macalester College (“Higher Ed’s Ruinous Resistance to Change, The Review Essay,” November 10, 2023, The Chronicle of Higher Education).

“By ‘change’ I don’t mean the addition of yet another program or the alteration of a graduation requirement, but something that is transformational and affects the way we do our work on a deep level,” says Rosenberg, who wrote  Whatever It Is, I’m Against It. Resistance to Change in Higher Education.

Rosenberg wonders why colleges and universities that talk about the transformative power of education in their mission statements find it so difficult to transform themselves; “why virtually no fundamental practice within higher education—calendar, tenure processes, pedagogy, grading—has changed in meaningful ways for decades, if not centuries.”

The financial problem is straightforward, Rosenberg says. “When the service you provide costs more than people are willing and able to pay for it, when you are unable to lower the cost of that service, and when the number of your potential customers is shrinking, you have what one might describe as an unsustainable financial model.”

If the financial challenges disappeared, transformational change would still be needed because the most compelling reasons for change are not economic but pedagogical, says Rosenberg, who highlights lack of change in teaching (the lecture) and the academic calendar.

“Even with all its flaws, higher education does far more good than harm, engages in many more effective practices, and changes lives for the better,” Rosenberg writes. “But if it were willing to think seriously about transformational change, let alone initiate it, if it were willing to examine its own ways of working as carefully as it examines many of the disciplines within its curricula, it could provide more benefits to more people consistently and avoid what looks increasingly like a bleak future for many institutions. The industry seems at the same time both to acknowledge and to ignore this reality.”

Selingo and Sigelman say that colleges need to realize that what employers want out of a degree has changed, and colleges need to rethink the credential so that their graduates can better compete in today’s job market.

“To make a degree more valuable, higher education must spell out the skills that students learn on campus and help them see where those skills are needed in the workforce,” Selingo and Sigelman write.

In the 1980s when college credentials were still relatively rare, a bachelor’s degree was a key differentiating factor for newcomers to the job market, they say.

“Today, for students facing rising costs and growing debt, it’s not as much of a slam dunk,” Selingo and Sigelman write. “Where the degree is from, what it is in and what skills you learn matter far more.

“To make the degree more valuable for more students, colleges need to bring new focus to how students fare after graduation. The bachelor’s degree needs to be remade for our increasingly degree-optional world.”

Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation, finds several factors to blame for tumbling college numbers but is most concerned with the growing skepticism about the value of college (“The College Problem in America Is about More Than Cost,” March 15, 2023, Forbes).

“Perception, so often, is reality, and we need to tell the higher ed story more effectively, even as colleges and universities work hard to hold the line on costs, build better counseling and other supports for students,” Merisotis says.

College is not for everyone, he notes, but some form of post-high-school learning or training is essential for jobs that pay a living wage and provide health care and other benefits. “Our country needs these jobs to grow, yet millions of positions are unfilled because there aren’t educated people available.”

Citing Georgetown’s CEW data, Merisotis says “a college isn’t needed” refrain is dangerously short-sighted. “Closing the door to higher education and the promise of a better life for citizens who already struggle is a strategy for continued strife in America,” he says.

Many schools are rebooting their programs and systems to help students complete their degrees and provide better paths to jobs, Merisotis notes. If colleges and universities can adapt enough to certify competencies in skills, they can establish themselves as essential partners in the national search for talent, he says. The need is there.

“America’s colleges and universities long have said that they inspire a love of learning that lasts a lifetime,” Merisotis says. “The needs of the coming age, though, call for schools to deepen and expand that commitment.

“They must become, not just inspirations, but vehicles for continuous learning. They must be a place where all Americans gain a first foothold on the American dream. They also must be the means by which displaced and tenuous workers can retrain themselves and reinvigorate their careers and lives.”

Merisotis says colleges need to document their progress and do a better job of answering the question, “What is college for?” “The lack of a clear answer in the minds of many people explains why there is some pessimism about the value of degrees—despite their enormous value in an increasingly complex world.”

Derek Bok, president of Harvard University from 1971 to 1991 and again in 2006 and 2007, reflects on how leading universities are responding to critiques from the left and the right and how they can do better.

In his new book, Attacking the Elites: What Critics Get Wrong—and Right—About America’s Leading Universities (2024), Bok examines the current disputes involving admissions, diversity, academic freedom and political correctness, curriculum and teaching, and athletics to determine which complaints are unsubstantiated, which are valid, and how elite universities can respond to their critics.

In the face of serious criticisms, elite universities have been strangely silent, Bok says. “Saying nothing is a dangerous strategy,” he says. “If the criticisms are repeated again and again with no response from the institutions involved, many people from all points on the political spectrum will assume that the accusations are valid.”

There is usually a valid problem connected in some way to each of the complaints, and universities should proceed immediately to remedy the problems, Bok notes. He offers several suggestions:

• Abandon hard-to-defend admissions policies, although it’s too late to gain much respect from eliminating legacy preferences.
• Seek ways to overcome the virtual absence of conservatives in their faculties without compromising their intellectual standards.
• Demonstrate their commitment to improve the quality of undergraduate education by taking steps, either individually or with others, to strengthen areas of instruction in which they are weak.
• Explore ways to teach “so-called soft skills” such as creativity, empathy, resilience, and conscientiousness.
• Improve the preparation of graduate students and non-tenure-track instructors and provide them with greater opportunities to play a more secure and effective role in teaching undergraduates.

Presidents of elites, if they are not already doing so, should consider reaching out more often to talk with critics such as politicians, both conservative and liberal, many of whom are graduates of their universities, Bok says.

Leading universities also need to make a more determined effort to inform the general public about the good things they are doing, Bok notes. It is hard to find any published account of the many ways by which these universities benefit the public.

“Casual readers and viewers today could easily gain the impression that the most important new developments in undergraduate education are the publication of lists of words that can give offense to others, and the ways by which artificial intelligence is helping students write their term papers without having to use their minds,” Bok writes.

“Media accounts of college life tend to pay much more attention to the occasional student disruption of a controversial speaker or the illegal efforts of a dozen celebrity families to get their children admitted to selective universities than they do to describing the remarkable efforts of thousands of student volunteers to help meet the needs of less fortunate members of society.

“In fact, many more worthwhile activities are going on in elite universities than most people realize. Building greater confidence by increasing understanding is a delicate task that universities must try to accomplish without sounding defensive, arrogant, or boastful.

“Success will not come quickly or easily. In the end, however, the saving grace for America’s elite universities is that they are remarkable institutions and they do contribute to society in many important ways.”

In the conversation about the value of college and its future, nuance should be considered (“What’s Really Behind the View That Higher Ed Isn’t Worth It,” by Scott Carlson, March 15, 2024, The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Carlson notes that colleges have their problems. “But despite its problems, American higher education has demonstrated its usefulness and is still valued by large swaths of the American public,” he says.

“The country has spent the past 80 years making enormous investments in its higher education infrastructure. Why would we toss it aside, even rhetorically, rather than put more effort into fixing it.”

Current pressures are likely to force change, and many difficult but clear steps could help colleges survive and improve their outcomes:

• Know the revenues, costs, and mission-relevance of your academic programs, and make the necessary adjustments.
• Deepen the interactions that students have in advising and career counseling, going beyond superficial conversations about majors and outcomes.
• Do away with barriers to transfer and other bureaucratic hassles often set up by the institutions themselves.
• Reform the incentives for faculty members to emphasize teaching, and offer more training to help them improve at it.
• Form partnerships with other colleges to share resources (even courses), make more connections with community organizations that can offer opportunities to students, and incorporate more hands-on learning outside the classroom.

“Much of the time, colleges just need to get out of their own way to pull off those moves,” Carlson says. “But they also need the public’s support to make those shifts—and a narrative that argues college isn’t worth it undermines the argument for reform and will push more institutions to close. One those institutions are gone, they will never return.”

Patrick Methvin, director of postsecondary success at the Gates Foundation, notes that higher education experts may know empirically that college degrees often contribute to socioeconomic mobility. “But, unfortunately, students are not getting their information from the same economists we’re listening to,” Methvin says.

High-school students’ two top sources of information about college are counselors and parents, and thus what they hear about college is mostly positive. Adults list Google searches and social media as their top guides, leading to a negative perception.

Strong Moral Governing Principles Needed for Reform

Bunch says that any true fix for “the college problem” needs a set of strong moral governing principles, or strategy, to be implemented before embarking down the roadmap of policies, or tactics. He proposes four foundational principles:

• Universality—government, Bunch says, “has an obligation to help young Americans navigate the perilous straits that run between high school and entering adulthood, with an ambitious ‘new deal’ that offers a tuition-and debt-free traditional university education to those who desire one, but different kinds of opportunities—vocational or trade training, shorter bursts of online or targeted learning, apprenticeships, internships, civilian or military opportunities—for those seeking a different path.”

• A “Public Good”—today’s American public already broadly supports higher education as a public good, Bunch says. “America’s failure to invest properly in its most valuable, and most fragile, human infrastructure—its young people awkwardly entering adulthood—can only be seen as a gobsmacking failure, “he says.

“The deliberate decision to instead make higher education a personal good—with a stiff financial burden on those who pursue college dreams—under the banner of a rigged meritocracy has caused bitterness, resentment, and despair among the millions either cast aside or bankrupted. Yes, shifting the burden to make higher education a public good would look very expensive on paper. But how can we afford not to?”

• Forbearance—the college-debt crisis isn’t only a matter of economics but a question of morality and justice, Bunch says.

• Liberal Education—since the tumultuous 1960s and ‘70s, the move away from liberal education in favor of campus careerism—both in course offerings but also in student preference —has rivaled rising tuition as the defining college trend of our time, Bunch says. But it’s not exactly clear whom the career-focused American university of the twenty-first century is helping, he adds.

“But the simple fact that America’s rapid decline toward populist authoritarianism under Trump, and the civil-war grade political division that accompanied it, coincided with a sharp decline in liberal education is also a powerful argument for its return,” Bunch writes.

Bunch believes that “despite the mistakes of privatization and misguided meritocracy that divided the nation, a renewed commitment to a true higher education can help heal us.

“That means universal schooling or training benefits for all young adults, funded as a public good and not as a high-stakes pass/fail test of self-worth, centering critical thinking and civic engagement over rote workforce development.”

Bunch argues for a “massive mobilization commitment to national service, which would signal a national do-over on what we mean by higher education, equal in impact to the cataclysmic changes wrought by World War II and its aftermath.”

The United States has always had the money for this, Bunch says, citing a U.S. Department of Education study showing that state spending for colleges and universities remained flat since 1990 while outlays for prisons doubled to the point that 18 states spent more money on incarceration than higher education.

Higher Education Is Worthwhile Investment But Needs to Change

Over the past 50 years, I have watched higher education endure many external and internal pressures and changes, evolving from a post-World War II public good with broadening access to a private good with limited access for many students and families.

Many social, demographic, economic, technological, and political changes have affected higher education, and there is no shortage of issues. Today, for example, higher education wrestles with how to incorporate AI, how to balance free speech with campus security, and how to fix the financial aid application system.

Yet college has not worked for everyone, as Bunch explains. Barriers to college persist for many students and families, leading to increased public skepticism, which affects participation.

Gaps in access to and success for students and faculty in higher education continue based on race, ethnicity, and gender. Colleges grapple with declining enrollments and limited financial resources. Several colleges have closed.

College costs too much for many families. Borrowing, once seen as an investment to help students and families pay their share, grew out of control, leading to enormous debt, often affecting life decisions.

Besides cost, other issues affect current and prospective students, including mental health concerns, poor academic preparation, and food and housing insecurity.

Nevertheless, higher education contributes to the nation’s progress by its advanced research in many professional fields and its preparation of the current and future workforce. Thus, higher education remains a critical, worthwhile investment that merits continuing public and private support.

To maintain and increase its status as a public priority, however, higher education must recognize and adapt to the changing landscape, acknowledge its shortcomings, and implement reforms. Higher education must manage itself more effectively and efficiently, ensure accountability, and do a better job informing the public of its contributions to society.