Americans' confidence in higher education has taken a nosedive

This short article is one person's take on a recent Gallop poll. Here is a direct link to the poll itself: https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat...

The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1]

The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility.

1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.

My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college.

I have teenage children who are looking at starting high school. I've been looking at Youtube videos reading books etc. It seems the only way is if you get straight As, start charities, get national awards, write amazing essays and have "significant impact" in your community with leadership positions. No normal 14 year old naturally does this, realistically it seems you can only get anywhere if you hire a coach to help you do all those right things.

I also actually hire a lot of graduates and most of them are great but many from the top schools are just burnt out and really dont want to work any more - if they did all that stuff I'm not surprised.

System seems screwed up.

A lot of people in America were tricked to go into college and take out huge loans that they may never be able to pay back.

The common push from the majority of generation x to millennials was to finish college. What they don’t understand is that world has changed and even now a college is more of a business as opposed to a learning center. You have for profit scam college everywhere and useless degree mills.

I suggest going to college but only if you really understand the loans your taking out and have a plan to pay them back. I think college is not for everyone and that’s fine.

Higher education is not a great filter anymore. Everyone goes to college - and most students simply don’t have the fundamental intelligence for it to mean much. Colleges have also changed - there are large numbers of activist degrees that seem to not really be serious fields. People get degrees in such fields that aren’t economically valuable and then struggle in the job market. If you’re studying something that personally interests you but isn’t useful to others (as the job market suggests), aren’t you just doing a hobby?

And then there’s all the cultural stuff. Colleges are political mono cultures, and increasingly have abandoned liberal values like free speech for an authoritarian, violent attitude towards any view other than the progressive left. In other words, they lack diversity. Maybe not by skin color or whatever but certainly of ideas. Same with faculty.

The author should also mention the increase in competition in the labor market and the lack of labor protection laws to prevent outsourcing. Statistically speaking, a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings. A lot of the negative sentiments I conjecture come from the higher standards across the board and the ubiquity of a bachelor's degree in the labor market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory

I like to refer to higher education as legacy education. As someone who skipped college and jumped right into the workforce after the dot com boom, I was renting an apartment/paying my own bills/managing my own affairs by the time I was 21. I had to figure everything out on my own. I was making 60k/year in a big city maintaining websites and helping the small media company I worked at with IT problems. My comp is in the high 200s/low 300s these days. No formal education.

When I talk to college aged family or friend's kids, its completely opposite. They are willing to take on 100k+ loans for a major they know nothing about, their parents manage everything for them (my 21 y/o nephew still gets his prescriptions and doctors appointments managed by his mommy), and they think becoming student 34,000 at some mediocre state school is the path to success. They are young - its not their fault, but we need alternative voices in this discussion. Young people should be taking gap years - go work an odd job away from home, learn to live on your own, rent a place with some friends. If you wanna get drunk often, or expedite your serfdom to a FAANG or Goldman Sachs, go ahead, but it builds little character.

I will be encouraging my children to do something memorable - go work for the national park service, work on a fishing boat, work in food/restaurant service in some tourist town, start your own small biz, apprentice under a craftsmen, etc. If you decide you want to go to a corporate rearing center, they aren't going anywhere.

Higher education is personally very challenging and not how people were designed. Even those with some standard deviation above the mean aren't meant to study books all day.

This becomes evident now that there is more and more instant gratification around slot machines disguised as social apps.

It is not about a student loan but about investing hundreds of hours of intellectually challenging work, either stressful (unstructured learning) or highly disciplined (planned learning).

In earlier years, say the 1990s and 2000s, there was no FOMO. Going to university was work—white-collar work. You were either qualified to take this route or not, and degrees were needed to enter specific job markets, mostly better paid and without physical demands on your work besides sitting.

When the bachelor's degree was somewhat democratized, the baseline sank: differentiation was gone, and a degree was no longer exceptional.

Now, you face the question of why you should invest years into education that "There is an app for this" can handle within milliseconds. The old funnel of education towards more yield took a hit.

When I graduated from eighth grade, we had to choose a graduation song. A classmate laughingly suggested Pink Floyd's “We don’t need no education” and I seconded it. Our teacher dismissed the idea in a way that offended me, so I turned it into a big argument about freedom and dignity. It became a shouting match.

The authorities ended up choosing a song from the Muppet Movie, instead.

I didn't even like Pink Floyd. I think I had heard the song once before in my life. But I did think it would be funny to sing it at graduation-- ironically, of course-- and also as a reminder that education is all about helping kids become functioning adults who make choices for themselves, not drones who pretend to feel and believe what the elders dictate.

I'm sure the class would not have gone with Pink Floyd, but I wish our teacher had let us go through the process of debating it properly. Then it would have been our decision.

I suppose this comment is not that relevant to the article, but what the hell. You only live at least once.

It seems all the concerns boil down to economics. I don't think people did nearly as much cost-benefit analysis in the past. The fact that college was affordable meant you were freer to experiment and enjoy yourself. Now that the price is so high, it entails pressure to get your money's worth. Thus creating a vicious cycle.

Am I missing something here? The figures quoted in the opening paragraph suggest to me that confidence is rising.

> Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.

I personally lack confidence in higher education because I'm neurodivergent, and high school pushed a method of learning that is not compatible with the way in which my brain works. They demanded I learn things in advance rather than as-needed, which is not how I operate - it is the source of the "how will this ever be useful later in life?" that is oft-cited of students.

I am extremely resourceful when given access to a search engine, but I cannot read an entire textbook and then recall specific information from it. I only retain information that is actually relevant to my task and I can't decide relevance after the fact. They don't understand this and don't accommodate for this, so I had to drop out.

I have no reason to believe that college is different. Even if it were, I don't feel that I need it! To graduate high school would've been nice, but it's not really worth it for me now. Real high-paying jobs do not care about the presence or absence of a high-school diploma if you can prove it doesn't matter. At least in software development, programming/engineering skill usually speaks for itself.

I have to wonder if others are realizing this about themselves, too, or at the very least feeling it. Certain people, I'm sure, would be able to tell if, in general, learning and information-gathering is quite easy for them, while school is hard for no good reason. The internet is a wonderful thing; sure social media is terrible, but just in general we're all now quite spoiled and it's obvious that we could have it much better than school.

>This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.

This tells you just how much more public opinion is steered by discourse and media than by any real numbers. Compared to 2015 objective changes in anything relevant to the college experience is pretty marginal to non existent, costs aren't higher than they were a decade ago[1], save for some select schools which again, dominate the media.

There's a similar phenomenon where confidence in the economy basically just correlates with who is currently sitting in the White House.[2]

I think any "American's confidence in X" at this point is basically an almost useless metric because it's simply split among political or news dietary lines.

[1]https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76

[2]https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/2023/08/14/30e9ffad-...

When former students need the federal government to bail them out of their debt, it's clear the value of higher ed has plummeted.

Long ago, I was told that it was only worth paying for College if you were going to be an Professional Engineer or a Nurse. It seems that advice has held true.

I've never pushed my child towards College.

I expect to send all of my children to university but they're going to receive much more financial scrutiny than I did regarding the possible future jobs/incomes provided by the degree.

I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.

It's cruel and immoral and must change.

Rightly so.

University degrees should be good investments that pay huge dividends for time and tuition, they largely are not. University degrees should confer a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life, they largely do not.

They have become certificate mills where people generally don't care about learning anything but just are looking to pass the test and get the credential.

I have known way too many people with degrees who just can't think for themselves and who either learned a very specific set of skills or really none at all.

What does "confidence" mean exactly? Regardless, I'm sure that the students actually in college are there for "all the right reasons."

AI will challenge the reasons we go to college even more.

> According to a new Gallup poll, Americans are losing the thread with higher education. Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.

This paragraph shows why. 1/3 having little or no confidence now compared to 57% fairly or "very" confident. Without knowing the magnitude of the middle choice, is this even comparable?

It doesn't help that this is two paragraphs down:

> 3) an unpromising job market with diminishing returns for un-STEM professions and 3) the many tortured varietals of “free speech” discourse.

Ok, it's probably a typo, but still, not confidence inspiring.

Also, why is "very" in quotes, but "fairly" not?

It's too bad they don't hire proofreaders anymore. That used to be a job you could get out of college.

Higher-Ed will become like real oak/maple wood flooring (vs. composite/manufactured).

Those who can't afford it won't indulge.

Those who can, will, because IYKYK.

What’s clear to me is that our feeling about University is a bit like the Anna Karenina quote: Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In other words, a lot of people are unhappy with college, but everyone has their own ax to grind about why.

I will say that I have never experienced any ideological purity tests that conservatives are constantly complaining about. Maybe that’s because I mostly took math and engineering classes.

That moment the higher education took a HUGE swandive into the empty cement pond, is when their admission no longer relies on SAT/ACT.

Soon, LSAT and others to follow.

It is like the state no longer demanding an occupational license, leaving consumers rudderless in getting quality workman.

I for one will only be checkibg for medical degrees that have SAT and MCAT admission in force policy. This act only disservice those hardworking and legitimate grads.

https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/medical-schools-that-d...

Why teach kids stuff that will be obsolete by the time they come of age to work?

AI is going to do to most subjects what calculators did to arithmetic, and desktop publishing did to cursive writing. Is anyone learning their times tables and calligraphy today for everyday use?

Sadly, star trek had it right — once you’re hooked up to the borg hive mind with neuralink, it’s not even clear what any individual has to add to “the collective”.

Change my mind!

Or in 30 years: “Change our mind”

Educated competent people being paid dogshit is becoming more common.

And yet acceptance rates at top schools have been consistently going down.

I have acquired both trade and university/academic skills but most of my career has involved the latter.

When employing my trade-learnt skills I apply myself in a quite different manner to that when I'm working in my more formalized profession, and in some ways I've found that way of working more enjoyable. Achieving or creating things with one's hands can be most satisfying.

About 40 years ago trade-based skills such as woodworking, metalwork, tooling, crafts, etc. that employed a large percentage of the workforce fell out of favor and that a career that required a college/university education was seen to be more financially rewarding. This resulted in a huge increase in the numbers who attended college/university.

Leaving aside politics, I think it's time to reappraise our educational needs, and we should stop looking down upon jobs that involve manual work/dexterity as we've done in the recent past. Moreover, we shouldn't forget that until the age of high tech and automation most work was of a manual dexterous nature and productively therefrom provided most of our needs. Not all but much of that is still relevant.

I know what I'm saying flies in the face of modern automation, computerization and smart working, etc. And I acknowledge that my view is counterintuitive given current trends in today's world.

Nevertheless, from what I've observed, many, many people don't want or have need to know the intricate workings of advanced engineering and technology, or unfathomable facts about the physical world such as why α is ≈1/137. I'd thus suggest that in many instances a university education has not necessarily been the best fit or outcome for many people.

Perhaps it's only now that many are beginning to realize the benefits of acquiring an advanced education are just not worth the time and effort not to mention its inordinately high cost. And to some extent we now may be seeing a reversal of the problem we had before the current trend of seeing a college education as a necessity—that's where many who were suited to a college education were unable to receive one through lack of finances and such.

Little doubt the picture is more complex than I've painted it. Irrespective, I'm not for a moment arguing or agreeing that we should dumb down education in any way. In fact I'd argue the opposite, which is that we need to better educate and train people in ways that most suit both their abilities and personal traits/personalities so they lead more fruitful lives.

Furthermore, I'd argue that as a society we need a better understanding of both the educational needs of individuals and those required by society for it to function properly, and that this is urgent because of major changes and developments in manufacturing, with the impact of AI and other significant changes within society. These changes are already having a profound impact on what people do and how they go about doing it. It's all the more urgent we address these issues now because change is occurring with ever-increasing rapidity.

I'll finish by saying that for the benefit of both those who are being educated and of society generally we must dispel the somewhat elitist notion that's often seen in academia and by many employers that those who work in the trades are doing low and menial work and that they are so employed because they are either incapable of more advanced academic work or are otherwise unsuited for it.

Such notions aren't helpful for many reasons but the most obvious one is that they skew the numbers of those who go into trades and professions and the impact of this skewing is negative. Also, it's important to stress that many trades require considerable training as well as the development of excellent skills together with lots of experience, especially so if they are to be performed well. Essentially, much work that's now deemed as trades-based is far from being menial.

Next, some of the smartest people I know work in the trades and I'd put them up against many who've more formal qualifications. Also, from my observation, many of the people who I've encountered who are happiest and live the most contented lives are trades people.

Not surprised as most majors don't leaf to valuable jobs and higher education turn from an attempt to help the younger generation to business.

Higher ed was the driving force for a lot of the protests etc was bound to be “punished” for lack of a better word same with Hollywood the devil works hard but farm boys work even harder

Maybe ed industry has become too regulated to have a chance to be useful? There are a lot of things even a private school can't teach children, for example: government's taxes is just an aggression, proprietary software is evil even if this is "required" by some teacher or institution, history lessons is just propaganda, god is an undefined value etc.