News/Commentary

Nearly half of Americans reportedly don’t want to send children to college as degrees fail to pay off

September 9, 2023 | | Print Article

A number of reports are surfacing showing that American parents are “losing faith” in a college education for their children and believe that some degrees are not worth the cost.

(Video Credit: NewsNation)

“A decade or so ago, Americans were feeling pretty positive about higher education,” contributing writer Paul Tough wrote for the New York Times Magazine.

That changed in just 10 years according to a 2021 survey, with “now almost half of American parents” stating that “they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.”

Tough noted the sobering results following economic researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis establishing a “wealth premium” to assess the economic benefits of college weighed against debt and total assets.

“Among families whose head is of any race or ethnicity born in the 1980s and holding a postgraduate degree, the wealth premium is… indistinguishable from zero,” the economic researchers noted. “Our results suggest that college and postgraduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment.”

“Black college graduates born after 1980 were experiencing almost no wealth premium at all,” Tough continued, explaining that Latino families also saw little actual wealth from a college education. The report found that white college graduates from the 1980s “had only a bit more wealth than white high school graduates born in the same decade.”

The findings follow a massive drop in college enrollment across the United States, according to Tough.

“In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States,” he continued. “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.”

Many conservative parents and students have been turned off from attending overly-politicized college campuses where liberal woke ideology is being pushed that is considered Marxist in nature. Colleges are now seen as indoctrinal rather than educational.

“In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 19 percent of Republicans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education, down from 56 percent in 2015,” Tough pointed out. “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.’”

He also compared views concerning a college education between Democrats and Republicans.

“In an ongoing Pew survey, the portion of Republicans (and those who lean Republican) saying colleges and universities had a negative effect on the country rose to 58 percent from 37 percent in just two years, between 2015 and 2017, while the responses of Democrats (and those who lean Democrat) held steady,” he concluded.

“Many people had decided to go into college during the Great Recession because there weren’t a lot of jobs,” Ana Hernández Kent, a senior researcher for the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, told NewsNation in an interview. “Now, it’s kind of the opposite.”

Users on X sounded off on whether college was worth it or not… mostly not:

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