Is College Worth It?

Going to college might be the worst investment you can make in your future. Now, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t go to college or that it’s not worth it, but the idea that our parents and teachers have been telling us since the 90s - that a college education is the key to lifelong career success is, unfortunately, bullshit. 

Hi, I’m Abelina Sabrina here for Good Morning, Bad News, and you should know that it used to be the case that most people didn’t go to college. So back when Baby Boomers went to college, if they were willing to spend 4 years and a few summers working part-time to pay for higher education, it would set them apart from other applicants and gave them a huge boost in their future careers. But as is the case with basically everything else that baby boomers have ruined in your future - today for many, a college degree is now worth less than the paper it’s printed on. 

The cost of college has increased at 5 times the rate of inflation over the last 50 years, and instead of paving a brighter future for young people, many college students are saddled with unpayable student loan debt that actually destroys their ability to progress in their lives or career because they have to take worse jobs at lower pay immediately after graduating to pay off their crushing debt, or risk defaulting on their loans, destroying their credit, and making it impossible to do any of the things you need to do to secure a good job like have stable housing or even a cell phone plan - neither of which you can get if your credit has been ruined by student debt.

 Of course, there are plenty of high-paying jobs that do require a college degree, however because predatory student loans and the laws around those loans make it easy for anyone to borrow almost any amount of money for their education, the labor market is intensely saturated with degree-holders. So in exchange for borrowing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and spending a decade in school, all you really end up getting is a checkbox marked on an application, and after that, your degree doesn’t matter to anyone. In fact, the situation is reversed. 

Having a degree is not actually rewarded in the job market, but NOT having a degree is harshly punished. How many jobs have you seen that are entry-level and have nothing to do with prior education, but also strictly require a college degree to even apply? Those jobs aren’t trying to find people who are college educated, they’re trying to weed out marginalized groups that have less access to education opportunities. America openly punishes people without standardized education more than any other country on earth, even when looking at something as simple as a high school diploma. Nearly a third of those without one live in poverty - but in nearly every other high-income country, less than 5% of people without diplomas see the same result. 

And when looking at education disparity against racial and economic disparity, it actually becomes clear that the poorer you are, the less a degree actually serves you in the long run, despite being touted as a lifeline out of poverty. College graduates who come from low-income families earn just a few percent more than middle class non-graduates, and that’s only for the first few years of their careers. Over time, middle class non-graduates end up making MORE money than college graduates born in poverty - so not only do poor graduates end up making less, they’re also saddled with student loans - that as of 2022 have ballooned to $1.6 trillion dollars, an amount that has nearly tripled in the last decade. But even when canceling out economic background, it’s still a hard argument to make that a college degree is worth it anymore. 

According to the New York Times, since the year 2000 the wage gap between high school and college graduates has slowed significantly. 1 in 4 people who hold a college degree make about the same amount of money as people who only graduated high school The devastating irony is that college itself isn’t useless or a bad investment. Rather, the economic conditions that enrich the ultra-wealthy through unbreakable lifelong loans pushed on literal children by the authority figures that run their lives, has completely inverted the purpose of going to college. Instead of being a source of education that can be applied to a job, it’s a growth vehicle for financial institutions, and an easy way to weed people out of the job market, like the poor or people of color. 

And because these truths are self-evident, even people without degrees (like myself) aren’t stupid enough to fall for that scam, and as a result, people have stopped going to college. Just since the start of the pandemic, enrollment is down by over one million over the last two years, and since 2012, it’s dropped by 3 million. And for the U.S. population at large, that’s actually terrible news! Because while getting a degree is, for many, a bad financial investment - getting an education is almost always a good life investment, and we’re already dealing with an undereducated population and seeing the problems that come with that. 

As the U.S. falls globally in terms of education, other countries are seeing record-high college enrollment, which does have a direct impact on America’s ability to compete economically, not to mention politically, or socially. While not going to college obviously doesn’t make you dumb, there IS a direct relationship between education rates and things like health and life expectancy. So it’s not too far off to say that by making it financially impossible to go to college without drowning in debt, and by flooding the market with mandatory degrees for jobs that don’t need it - the economic system that created these conditions is literally killing the U.S. population. 

Getting an education is important, but not if it means you can’t afford to start a family or buy a house, or work a job that makes you happy - and for many, getting a college degree is a barrier to those goals, not a pathway to success.