The latest NBC News poll shows two-thirds of registered voters down on the value proposition of a degree. A majority said degrees were worth the cost a dozen years ago.
Americans have grown sour on one of the longtime key ingredients of the American dream.
Almost two-thirds of registered voters say that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost, according to a new NBC News poll, a dramatic decline over the last decade.
Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” while 63% agree more with the concept that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”
The sad thing is that college is and has been viewed for at least my entire life as just a more elaborate version of a vo-tech school.
Which I kind of understand - I didn’t want to come out of uni with no path forward either, so I went for CS. Believe me, I understand the game.
However - it’s a real shame that we don’t treat K-12 or university as something to really broaden the mind, but only as a way to sort the population into various ways to earn money. Essentially ONLY used as a job training program.
Instead of treating education as something that should be about getting a liberal education in every sense of that word with the aim of making as many people as possible autodidacts so they could not only think for themselves, but they could teach themselves nearly anything they care to learn, K-12 + higher education is expected to be about prep for a job. This kind of education essentially makes “do your own research” little more than a punchline aimed at morons who are doing no such thing.