Why Americans Are Losing Faith in College

Twenty years ago, higher education was one of the most trusted institutions in America. Today, confidence in higher ed is falling among every demographic: young and old, men and women, Republicans and Democrats, those who didn’t finish high school and those with framed PhDs on their wall. And it’s not just attitudes. In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities across the U.S. Last year, there were about 15 million undergrads. That’s a decline of roughly 16 percent. In a recent essay for The New York Times, author Paul Tough, who’s published several excellent books about college in America, wrote: “Americans have turned away from college at the same time that students in the rest of the world have been flocking to campus. Why?” Today’s guest is Paul Tough. We talk about why a noxious stew of economics, culture, and inequality has turned a surprising number of Americans against college. Who’s to blame, and what happens next?

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In the following excerpt, Paul Tough explains how college prepares people for the workplace and how opinions on the importance of a college degree have changed over time.

Derek Thompson: You have written several books about college. You’ve written several articles about college. I want to start by forcing you to steelman a position that might be obvious to you and a lot of people listening: What’s so great about college? College is just two, four, maybe six years of our life. What is so important about these two, four, six years of our lives?

Paul Tough: Well, I could give you a couple of different answers. I don’t know if either will count as an official steelman position, but from a human perspective, I feel like this is an incredibly important developmental time in a young person’s life, usually starting around 18 years old. Often, this is the first time a young person leaves their home. It is just a moment where you grow up, where you figure out what you care about, what you believe in, or who you are.

A lot of parts of your identity, I think, become much clearer in those years, whether you’re in college or not. So being in a place where that can happen in a positive, productive sort of way can be a super important thing. So that’s the sort of mushy, humanistic side. On the hard economic side, the data is really clear that something happens to people who go to college that tends to increase their earning power by a whole lot, so whether that is actually gaining knowledge, or whether it’s—I think more likely—gaining the kind of skills that turn out to be really valued in the marketplace, something happens to make you a more valuable economic actor in those years.

Thompson: Do you have a strongly held theory about what it is that happens that makes people capable of being great, smart, complex workers when they graduate? Because something that I’ve noticed in my life is I think about all of the majors that my family and my friends did, the majors that I did. You’ll have all these situations where someone’s a major in English and they write an essay about Gertrude Stein and they end up being a [project manager] for Google. And there’s nothing that’s directly related between writing an essay about Gertrude Stein and being a wise PM at Google. What do you think is happening in these four years that seems to allow certain people to engage in complex work that sometimes just doesn’t have very much to do with their major?

Tough: You sound like a humanities major when you say that. I was the same thing.

Thompson: I was a journalism major and political science. Yeah.

Tough: Got it. OK. I think it depends on the major. I think there are some people—like computer science majors, engineering majors, but also people who are studying HVAC or welding or plumbing at a community college—for whom they are literally building professional skills that they’re going to use on day one. ... I’m sure they’re also learning how to work, how to show up on time, how to complete assignments, but there’s a lot of very specific job skills. For everybody else, I think there’s a case people make that if you’re not learning specific job skills, you’re not actually learning anything valuable. It’s just sort of the sheepskin effect. It’s just about credentialism.

But I had this experience when I was reporting my last book, The Inequality Machine, where I was following this young Princeton student, a woman I was following because she’d grown up in really disadvantaged circumstances and made it to Princeton. She was in this amazing—I can’t even remember what they called it—sort of seminar with 15 other brilliant Princeton freshmen sitting there talking about some Roman writer, sitting around a table, and it was very erudite and smart. I realized that at a certain point, it was absolutely job training, the sorts of skills that she was learning about how to sit around a conference table and speak your mind and hold an argument and analyze someone else’s argument precisely but not rudely.

There are so many jobs where this is an incredibly valuable skill. Writing a close reading of Gertrude Stein? Incredibly valuable if you’re never going to read Gertrude Stein again, right? The idea of taking a text and reading it very closely and analyzing it. There are all sorts of ways that these are valuable. So I say that not as, like, a mushy case for the humanities, but just to say, I think the way that modern workplaces have evolved, knowledge work or workplaces, a lot of those sorts of skills that have very little to do with content matter a whole lot. What you’re learning in college matters a whole lot when you get to those workplaces.

Thompson: Let’s dive right into the thesis of this podcast, which is that something incredibly strange and incredibly important has happened to American attitudes toward college. I want to start this story in 2009, the year the Great Recession is winding down, which to me seems like a high-water mark in terms of American attitudes toward college. Remind us how highly approved the institution of college and universities were just 14 years ago.

Tough: Well, so you can look at all sorts of different numbers that point to the same positive consensus about college in that era, 2009 and just afterward. So 74 percent of young adults were saying that a college degree is very important. I think maybe the most powerful number is that 70 percent of that year’s high school graduates went directly on to college that September, but the polling number that really sticks in my mind is this poll that was done around then with parents, where 98 percent of parents said that they expected their kids to go to college, which you just don’t get a lot of 98 percent polling numbers, no matter what the poll is. Yeah, I feel like both in terms of what young people were actually doing and what people were telling polltakers, there was this vast consensus that college was the way to go.

Thompson: Tell us what’s happened in the last 14 years.

Tough: Well, things have changed. In terms of the polling data, that 74 percent of young adults who were saying that a college degree is very important has fallen all the way to 41 percent. Those parents who used to be almost entirely unanimous that they expected their kids to go to college, now almost half of American parents say that they would prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college. And the swing is not quite as dramatic when you look at actual numbers of students going straight to college, but it’s still pretty big. Now, it’s down from 70 percent to 62 percent. In the most recent year that we have data for, 62 percent of high school graduates went directly on to college that fall. What that’s meant in terms of the total undergraduate population in the United States is that it’s fallen from 18 million back in the fall of 2010 to dipping below 15.5 million undergraduates in 2021. So 2.5 million undergraduates have disappeared from the nation’s college campuses.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Paul Tough
Producer: Devon Manze

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