VICTOR JOECKS: Why Americans soured on higher education

Without standards, college degrees aren’t worth much. Americans have started to notice.

A recent I&I/TIPP poll found that just 24 percent of Americans believe college degrees are worth the cost. Even among the college educated, nearly half — 49 percent — said they weren’t worth the expense. Another 14 percent were unsure.

This isn’t an outlier. Over the past year, polls from Gallup, Pew and NBC News showed a significant majority of Americans have soured on higher education.

It wasn’t always like this. In 2010, 75 percent of Americans said a college education was very important, according to a Gallup poll. By 2025, the number had plummeted to 35 percent.

For decades, popular culture has pushed college as the sure-fire path to financial stability. You’ve likely heard some version of the claim that college graduates earn more than $1 million more over their lifetimes than high school graduates.

There is ample statistical evidence for this — going back decades. More recently, full-time workers with a high school diploma earn a median of $1.6 million over their lifetimes, according to a 2021 Georgetown University report. “Bachelor’s degree holders earn a median of $2.8 million during their career, 75 percent more than if they had only a high school diploma,” the report said.

Understandably, this led parents, the education establishment and popular culture to spend decades pushing students to college. But as those poll numbers show, something has gone wrong.

A major factor is the destruction of educational standards. What made a college degree valuable to an employer — even if it’s printed on something fancy — wasn’t the piece of paper. It was what the piece of paper represented: that a student was smart or talented enough to receive admission; that he or she passed the college’s core curriculum; that he or she had specialized knowledge in his major.

A degree from an elite college was especially sought after because it signaled that you were especially smart.

Standards also help students fight procrastination, work harder and study more. Even though the pressure and stress can be unpleasant in the moment, they are essential tools to help students learn more.

For decades, however, the educational establishment has lowered the bar. Elementary schools send students who can’t read to the next grade. High school students graduate without being able to do freshman-level work. Politicians eliminated high school proficiency exams that would make this failure obvious. Colleges lowered standards and went woke. For decades, supposedly elite schools racially discriminated to let in applicants with lower test scores but favored skin colors.

There are still excellent schools. Hillsdale College and New Saint Andrews College come to mind. But many universities used the prestige they built over decades or even centuries to mask this shift.

While gutting standards lowered quality, it didn’t stop college tuition from skyrocketing.

In 1970, the average cost of a public college was under $400. That’s not per credit hour. That’s total. At private colleges, average tuition was just more than $1,700. Today, those numbers are more than $10,400 for a public college and nearly $40,000 for a private school. Tuition for students today is around 25 times higher than it was in 1970.

Increased demand, lower standards to accommodate more students and ample government student aid fueled these exorbitant price hikes. If you subsidize mediocre to poor education, you’ll get more of it.

P.T. Barnum is often thought to have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Today, those individuals aren’t watching the circus. They’re attending college.