Does college still matter? The Department of Education makes the case that college is more valuable than ever: Degree holders earn $1 million more that workers without postsecondary education and the innovation economy is likely to require a more educated workforce. But averages and projections hide the rapid loss of faith in higher education as the escalator to the middle class.
Frustrated with increasing costs and underemployed grads living in their parent’s basement, less than half of American adults have confidence in higher education, a big decline in the last three years according to Gallup.
With this rapid loss of faith in higher ed, expensive nonselective colleges are in trouble. A dozen trends have conspired to create the beginning of the end of college as we know it.