Americans are finally getting wise to the value of a four-year college degree. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds a significant growth in skepticism over the past four years, especially among Americans who haven’t graduated from a four-year college.
Overall, 49% of Americans believe that earning a four-year degree will lead to a good job and higher lifetime earnings, compared to 47% who don’t — a two-percentage point gap. Four years ago, that gap was 13 points.
Skeptics number in the majority — 57% to 37% — among Americans 18 to 34 years old. That should come as no surprise, as that age group has taken on a disproportionate share of the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student debt and is having the greatest trouble repaying it.
A majority of women still have faith in the four-year degree, reports the Wall Street Journal, but men’s attitude has undergone a dramatic reversal. Four years ago, men saw college as worth the cost by a 12-point margin; today they say its not, by a 10-point margin.
Many observers pushed college attendance on the astonishing superficial grounds that college graduates on average earn higher salaries and experience a lower unemployment rate than those who never went to college. What such analysis ignores is that the average earnings and unemployment for all college grads is not necessarily typical of earnings and unemployment of college grads on the margins, who were less academically prepared, received lower grades, attended less prestigious institutions. It also ignores the ugly reality of millions of Americans who racked up large debts attending college but failed to graduate.
Awareness is spreading that people can earn solid middle-class wages with a couple of years of technical training, without losing two years of earnings attending a four-year college or spending tens of thousands of tuition, fees, room, and board. The WSJ gave a great example:
Jeff McKenna, a 32-year-old from Loveland, Colo. said he doesn’t believe college is worth the cost. Mr. McKenna went to a trade school, earning a certificate as a mechanic and how earns a base salary of $50,000 a year. He said he has never gone three weeks without a job, including during the recession.
“I have friends from high school that are making half what I’m making, and they went and got a four-year degree or better, and they’re still $50, $60, $70,000 dollars in debt,” Mr. McKenna said. “There’s a huge need for skilled labor in this country.”
Indeed there is. As more people — young men, mostly — think like Jeff McKenna, there will be a growing demand for community colleges and trade schools that teach marketable blue-collar skills. Skepticism runs greatest in the college-age population, making it likely that four-year colleges will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their enrollments. Those at greatest risk are institutions that appeal to precisely those demographics — rural, lower-income, male — where skepticism runs the deepest.
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