Is college still worth it?
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Because at Verizon, we got you. Visit your local Chicago Verizon store today. $20 monthly promo credits applied over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate. Additional terms and conditions apply. Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. Hello, I'm Rima Kareis. It is Tuesday, June 10th. It is the time of the year when students are graduating, figuring out what comes next.

So today we are diving into a big question that may be on some graduates' minds as they try to land a job or think about enrolling in a program. And that is, is a college education still worth it? Because it's so expensive and it's getting more expensive. And then, of course, you have the expenses of living, especially if you go to school away from home. And on top of that, you've got our students.

current administration and his threats, President Trump's threats to federal funding for different kinds of schools, which have thrown a wrench into things. They want to get rid of the Department of Education. So lots to unpack here about the value of a college education in 2025. Brian Alexander is here to make us smarter about this, and he writes about the future of higher education and is also a senior scholar at Georgetown University. Welcome to the show, Brian. Thank you for letting me be here.

All right, let's do the big question first. Is college still worth it? It is worth it for a lot of students, but not necessarily for everybody. If you're just talking about financial benefit, then the majority of students who graduate, which is not all students, they do tend to have higher lifetime earnings than those who don't go to college. But students, there's a good number who don't finish college. That is, they take classes, but they don't graduate. And they get zero benefits for that on the marketplace.

And then you have students who take classes, get degrees, but the degrees are worth less than the investment they put into it. Right. So the financial pressure students are facing right now are huge. You know, it's becoming more and more expensive to get a degree, thanks to things like state budget cuts and how much universities are spending on their campuses. And like you said, even when students graduate, they're entering job markets where maybe wages have stayed largely stagnant and it doesn't feel worth it.

I guess, does it feel like the economic logic of pursuing a four-year degree is starting to unravel for some Americans? I think the perception is that we have, I mean, first of all, there's a lot of anxiety about student debt. And that can get overblown. But American student debt is enormous. It's unparalleled in the world. No other country comes close to us.

and maybe a third of students graduate without any student debt, which is terrific. The two thirds who do graduate with debt, the amount might be around $29,000 or $30,000. Now, if you're in a field and if you went to a school with a good enough reputation, you'll make much more than that in the course of your life. So it's a good investment. But

like I said, for students who don't graduate, they do have the debt, but they don't have the degree benefit. And for some students in schools that have lower reputations or fields that just aren't as well-paying, it might not be as much. But on top of this is the sense that

over the past 40 years we've had a big push that the more people get college the better better for every individual you know you get a better lifetime earnings you know as mentioned before on average uh that you get more they get better mental health better physical health you're more likely to participate in your community you're more likely to say in politics good stuff all around and you could also improve your community you're

You're better for the local economy, better for the local holiday, all this good stuff. And that consensus started to break down right around President Obama's second term. And that consensus is fraying more and more. And part of this political, you have a lot of Republicans who are way more skeptical of college than Democrats and Independents. Part of it is the specter of student debt. And also is, I think, there are other factors involved as well. There's some people politically are nervous about college.

what they may perceive as indoctrination. And some of them are anxious about AI, that they may get a job, but it'll be out of date by the time they graduate.

You know, you're talking about sort of the narrative around college being worth it or not. And there was a survey by Indeed that found that 51 percent of Gen Z respondents said their degree was a waste of money more than any other generation, which I imagine is going to perpetuate this narrative for the future generations. I mean, what does this mean for the economic viability of colleges?

It's terrible for the economic viability of colleges. I mean, until President Trump's second term, we could say that the elite institutions were protected from this. I spoke with the president of an elite liberal arts college once, and he said he didn't care about demographics. He didn't care about economics. All he needed was 900 bright undergraduates every year.

And for him, that was true. I mean, that was all he needed. That was fine. And they had a very, very high reputation. They could do that. And you think about the institutions, you think about Stanford, you think Harvard. And again, until Trump's second term began, they would be able to escape from most of these. They could rely on their huge reputations. They could rely on their endowments. They could rely on enormous amounts of donations, bribes.

But the rest, 95%, the rest of higher education depends on the students coming in the door. And as those numbers decline,

Some universities, some colleges enter a death spiral. We've seen a whole slew of small private institutions close. In the state of Pennsylvania, their Penn State University system just closed seven institutions. So there's that. And now, of course, President Trump, who's drawing a bead on the elite institutions going after schools like Columbia, Harvard, that

that hits them as well. And depending on how that plays out in terms of legality, that could really, really hurt them too. Overall, 10 years ago, I camped with the idea of what I call peak higher education.

that American higher ed had reached an upper limit of student demand, if you will, and that we might decline from that point. And we have total enrollment in American higher education has dipped down every year. It really fell down during COVID. And right now we're almost at pre-COVID levels, but that's not a good direction. Historically, it's a weird direction for us to go.

Right. And at the same time, it seems like we're seeing a rise in interest in things like certificate programs, apprenticeships, technical training. What do you think is behind the appeal of these alternative career paths? Well, for some of them, it's time and money. So getting a certificate is just swifter. Getting online degrees are definitely much more appealing for adults who have complicated lives. So for, you know,

An adult with children and or adult parents might find online education much more convenient. I think the, so, you know, you have to save time, you have to save money and be more convenient. All of these things matter. I mean, there's also a little bit of insulation from the technology change we're seeing. I mean, the common thing I hear people saying is like, hey, I can't, you know, plumb your pipes for you or fix your car. Well, this is quite true. Not yet.

I mean, automation, AI is definitely in the lead. Robotics are coming up fast. And right now there's a kind of arms race in robotics between the US and China, and China is arguably doing better.

But for right now, this is a source of a great deal of appeal. If you take a look at the demographics of people working in HVAC, plumbing, electricity, woodworking, those populations are aging up very fast. And this is actually going to be a problem at some point as people retire or die out of those fields. There's a lot of tacit knowledge that might just disappear. So for a lot of young people, thinking about some 18 or 19, they consider two choices. Okay, I can go get

my bachelor's, it'll take four, really five or six years. And I anticipate this will be a lot of debt, or I can apprentice over here to an electrician and start working and making money in a year or two.

It's a pretty compelling alternative, that second choice. And now there's a lot of gender to this as well. Right now, higher education, many more women attend as students. Right now, roughly 60% of the student population is female, roughly 40% is male, which is a historic big shift, but it's right there. And so a lot of these fields that you talked about that AI can't do yet are often male-dominant.

You know, I keep going back to that stat 51% of Gen Z respondents saying that a degree is a waste of money. It's so high. I mean, so if the dominant narrative used to be that everyone should go to college, what message do you think is replacing that idea today? That's a great question. And there really isn't a successor message now.

I mean, there are a few different messages. There's the VOTEC one. So go get a quick associate's degree or certificate in something that you can work with your hands. So say diesel technology or basic electrical engineering for repairs, that kind of thing. That's one narrative that's there. And Randy Weingarten from the American Federation of Teachers has been arguing this for quite some time now and saying that we should have that approach nurtured as far back as middle school and high school. So

So that's one narrative that's there. Another is the idea that

Undergraduate education, if you think about it as liberal education, really is the best preparation for the world because it teaches you all kinds of skills that might not immediately map one for one onto your next job, but will prepare you for jumping between multiple jobs, the ability to think through different intellectual domains, to work with different people, to have initiative, to communicate effectively. I mean, that's what liberal education really does.

And so that's one argument that's out there as well. The biggest weakness of this is the term liberal, of course, which is now massively politicized. But the other argument, we still have the residual idea.

And for a lot of people, this still works, that if you go to college or university, if you get your degree, if your major and the institution are sufficiently high quality or are there a certain quality, then your life, you have a much better chance of doing better. Now, for Generation Z, this may look daunting because they may see too many people for whom this didn't work. Looking ahead from 21 to say, well, by the time I'm 60, this will be worth it.

That's a long-term bet that is pretty shocking, but it is one that pays off. Again, for a majority of students, the key thing is really you have to graduate. I don't mean to sound like a disciplinarian by saying this, but all the research we have in industrial psychology, all the research we have in terms of economics shows that if a student gets a degree, we call it the sheepskin effect, that

That proves to an employer that you have a certain set of degrees, a certain set of skills and experience. If you don't have, if you go to UCLA for 10 years and you study six different languages and you become skilled in biology, but you don't have the degree, it's as if you didn't go. So that degree is really, really critical.

Has the value of different kinds of degrees changed? Because like I remember when I was first starting out in journalism, lots of people were getting master's degrees in journalism. And now a lot of folks in the industry say it's completely useless to get that. Sorry for everybody out there who's done that. But I mean, like, do different has changed?

the importance of getting different kinds of degrees change because I am also thinking about if everybody's got a bachelor's degree, does a bachelor's degree matter more than a high school diploma?

Oh, that's quite true. And by the way, my biggest cat is named after Hunter S. Thompson, the great PhD journalist. And he acts like him in a lot of ways. But, you know, thinking about this, first of all, you're absolutely right. There's this interesting, in terms of if everyone has a BA, then it's the BA, the new high school diploma. There's a really interesting problem that we have overproduced credentials so much. So, and yeah,

That's also supported to an extent by demand. Different states have different requirements for different employers that increasingly require associates or bachelor's degrees for jobs. This can be ludicrous at times. This can be overkill. There's an opposing movement to that called the breaking the paper ceiling idea that we should open up more jobs to people who don't have credentials.

multiple cities and multiple states have been doing misregovernment jobs. But in terms of the first part of your question, when it comes to different degrees, yes, you can think back to how the humanities used to be a pretty solid path forward to certain jobs if you go back to the 90s or the 80s. And that's really, really fallen down. Humanities enrollment has just collapsed over the past 20 years. It's not coming back up. And I mean, I'm a humanist myself. My PhD is in English. So I find this incredibly sad.

But it simply is what's going on. Now, what's happening now in terms of one of these, it might be very transformative, which is computer science. Computer science has been a boom industry for the last 40 years, often not. But it looks like right now there's a lot of anxiety about getting a degree that's based in coding when AI can code.

But STEM fields, other than that, are hugely in demand, and especially allied health. By allied health, I mean the full spectrum of healthcare, everything from nursing, surgery, dentistry, pre-med, computer science when it comes to, say, electronic medical records, administrative degrees for hospital administration, because allied health is so vast and is

The demand for that is simply increasing because our population in the United States is aging. And we know that statistically speaking, the older you get, the more healthcare you consume. And we also have this torturous system of financing

medical care in the U.S., which is not getting better. So the demand for this is huge. And the supply of workers is not good. We're running low on nurses. We're running low on technicians. So in many places, allied health is just a stable, stable path for some kind of professional job.

All right. So that's the field to go into if you want to keep your employment prospects. Thank you so much, Brian Alexander, who's a writer on the future of higher education and a senior scholar at Georgetown University, one of the universities surviving. Thank you. Thank you very much. You know, we didn't get so much into it, but the thing that I keep going back to is, you know, he mentioned it at the beginning of how higher education is

There's just so much going on right now. It's becoming such a proxy war for deeper cultural and political divides. And so, you know, I am curious how much that's actually impacting people's decision about whether or not to go to college right now when it feels like increasingly campuses are seen as these ideological battlegrounds and becoming more symbols of how people feel and what they want dismantled or...

And so like, I also think that's part of the narrative that's shifting. That's really interesting to me that college is no longer, you know, universally seen as a path of possibility, but it's also seen as something that's viewed with suspicion or framed as maybe as a bad bet, right?

Yeah, it feels like that probably matters more to like the adults in the room rather than the kids trying to decide whether or not to go to college. What really struck me from what Brian said was this idea that, you know, women are now overrepresented in getting college degrees and a lot of the degrees that are not sort of blue collar work

Are the ones being a lot of the things that you get a degree to do or the things that are being taken over by AI, whereas the HVAC stuff and the blue collar jobs that are more male dominated are the ones that are more resilient against HIV.

AI, which is just, of course, of course it is. Of course it is. Anyway, we want to know what you think about the value of higher education. Let us know. You can leave us a voicemail, 508-827-6278, also known as 508-UBSmart, and we will be right back. All right, we are back and it is time for some news. Do you want to go first, Kimberly?

Sure. I know I've been talking a lot and also reporting a lot on our shows about this reconciliation package, which is, as I've mentioned, very big, very important, very pricey, and would change a lot of things. Senate's working on that now. But there's something else also being negotiated in Congress at the moment, which is the budget spend, like the spending package. Now,

The terminology around this stuff gets really messy. So lots of people are talking about this reconciliation package, the package that would extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, individual tax cuts, along with a bunch of other stuff, as like the budget bill. It's not the budget bill. That's why you'll hear me talk about it as the reconciliation package. If I can clench my teeth hard enough, I'll say the one big beautiful bill act. Don't say it. Yeah. But...

So the Senate is working on that right now and they're removing some provisions. They're doing this whole birdbath thing, which checks whether or not it meets the rules of reconciliation so they can pass it without Democrats. But right now what the House is doing is they are actually trying to get going on the annual government spending bill. This is the thing where they have to go through all the appropriations committee and decide spending levels individually.

and actually pass the bill to fund the government from year to year, which is you've probably heard if you've been listening to the show for any amount of time, they rarely get done on time and they rarely get done almost never get done in the way that it's supposed to be. Last time that this came up to prevent a government shutdown, they passed in a full year continuing resolution.

to keep funding levels at, you know, the levels they were before, which was actually based on the extension of another continuing resolution because they can't get their stuff together. Anyway, the House is starting to work through these appropriations bills. They're doing something called marking them up.

But they also are talking like they can't really do much on the spending bills until they know what's going to happen with the reconciliation bill. Because so much of how spending gets determined is based on what happens in this massive tax package. So they're kind of stuck on that, which means that we're going to end up in another situation where that continuing resolution is about to run out.

And they're going to be in crunch time to try to pass something, which and one of the articles that I linked here is with Punchbowl News and I was listening to

to that one and also the CQ budget podcast and they were talking about it and we're probably going to end up in a situation where they pass whatever they pass for the reconciliation bill then there's a scramble to pass government funding because we'll be approaching a government shutdown and we're probably going to end up with another continuing resolution which would mean we're effectively in 2025 still operating off the more or less a budget framework left over from

fiscal year 2023, so effectively late 2022. And if you think about like all of the inflation we've had, all the changes to the economy, the tariffs, how much that changed, how much things cost, the difference in staffing levels in the federal government, given the doge cuts and everything like that, the idea that we would keep

funding things in the same way that we did years ago because Congress can't figure something out is just wild to me. But that's what we're being set up to do. Kimberly, you broke that down so easily. I get it now. Okay. That's really helpful for me.

Yeah, the big takeaway is that there's two different pieces of legislation. And I think folks are going to get them mixed up because they're both big. The reconciliation package is the one that has a tax cuts that can pass without the Democrats. And that's what the Senate's working on right now. The spending bill is the one that's going through the appropriations committees in the House right now. They still need Democrats to pass that annual spending bill, which is why it will probably end up being a CR.

Okay, in terms of my news item, I wanted to talk about this yesterday, but because there was so much news going on, I didn't. So I wanted to flag the travel ban, which went into effect yesterday. And, you know, this dovetails a little into the conversation we just had with Brian, because this travel ban...

You've likely heard something about it. This is the sweeping travel ban blocking nationals from 12 countries, including places like Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Yemen. And on top of that, they're putting limits on people from another seven countries, including

Including places, Cuba, Venezuela, Togo, just to list a few. So mostly the policies targeting countries in Africa and the Middle East. So in terms of students, the ban won't affect international students if they have valid visas or if they were at the U.S. If they were here in the U.S. at the time the ban was issued, but it will prevent prospective students from coming.

affected countries who are planning to come here in the fall from getting visas if they haven't already. Which again, goes back to the conversation contributing to this like climate of anxiety and fear, so many unanswered questions. But what I really want to talk about is just the fact that I didn't talk about this yesterday, says a lot about what we've been saying on the show, just how hard it is to keep up with all the news and

It was surprising to me how the reaction to this travel ban compared to the one in 2017. And, you know, just to back up even more, the stated justification from the administration is national security, preventing terrorism, high visa overstay rates, poor vetting systems. But, you know, immigrant rights groups, civil liberties groups, they are calling it what they see it as, which is

racist and discriminatory and politically motivated. But yeah, going back to what I was saying, it just it, it's a very different response. You remember what it was like in 2017. Kimberly, it Yeah, the so called Muslim ban was huge. It was shocking. There were protests outside airports. It was this was really a galvanizing moment in a lot of ways for folks. And

And, yeah, this is I think part of the reason why this didn't get so much attention last week was the breakup between Elon Musk and Trump took up a lot of the oxygen in the room. And, yeah, people are overwhelmed. There's a lot to keep up with. It's hard to know what to for folks. It's hard for folks to know what to protest anymore.

And so that's what I wanted to talk about. I also did see these stats from the American Immigration Council that is worth noting about just the economic impact. If we have some time, I can list some of them.

Because there are real human impacts, obviously, it goes without saying. I've been reading so many reports of how this could hurt communities and families. And, you know, I even saw a report out of Haiti saying that this would make it harder for kids to get life-saving surgeries that they need in the U.S.,

Anyway, but in terms of the economic impact, according to the American Immigration Council, in 2022, around 300,000 non-citizens from countries impacted by the ban arrived in the U.S. And then the following year, households with nationals from the targeted countries collectively earned $3.2 billion in income. They paid about $715 million in taxes, and they held $2.5 billion in spending power.

Lots of big numbers. So, again. So you're saying that this is the money that these folks could have spent in this country had they not been banned? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, not to reduce this issue to numbers, but it is, you know, we are an economic show and I want to be able to point to that. And, yeah, just remind people that there are very real economic consequences in addition to all the other ways it impacts communities. Yeah.

Yeah, it was interesting. The headline for the story that you linked here, Have Americans Grown Numb, which was similar to one that my former colleague Bracton Booker, who's now over at Politico, had in his newsletter. Oh, Bracton. Yes, Bracton. I love Bracton. Yeah.

But it's this idea that like are we now like numb and heartless to the plight of people, you know, being subjected to what is, you know, pretty clearly a racist policy targeting, you know, countries that brown people live in. And.

Or is it just that I don't think it's an or. I think what it is is that we are all overwhelmed and there are so many things to care about and people are picking and choosing. And so, yeah, it's a tough time. But let us get to the mailbag. Yes. Yes. Let's do that. Hi, Make Me Smart team. This is Rob from Detroit, Michigan. Rachel from Tempe, Arizona. Long time podcast listener, first time voice memo-er. I had a question. I'd love your take on it. Thank you for making me so much smarter. Thank you.

New sting. I know that was nice. All right. So follow up to the conversation we just had with Brian Alexander. We asked y'all yesterday to share your thoughts on the value of college and we got this voicemail from Mike in Tucson, Arizona.

I will tell you, as somebody who started off in active duty military with no college education and joined the military to get college education, I've been in the work industry with a degree and without a degree, and I will tell you, absolutely, it makes a huge amount of difference. The trades do actually pay very, very well. But after getting an engineering degree, I've basically doubled my salary here.

Wow. There it is. There it is. Yeah. All right. One more. A few weeks back, we asked you, our listeners, to let us know what your favorite comfort book is. And we've shared some responses on the show and we're still hearing from folks. Here's another one.

This is Cricket calling from Patuxent Village, Rhode Island. My favorite book to recommend, and I think Kimberly would especially enjoy this one, is called The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Just like it sounds, it's sci-fi. It's got some great different species, different genders, all kinds of found family stories. Oh, pardon my very loud cat, by the way, who says hi to our cats. Thank you. Have a great day.

Rima, what is your sort of go-to comfort read? Oh, man. I have so many depending on the season. Right now, I think I have two, nonfiction and fiction. I'm rereading Jane Eyre right now, which...

It's been, you know, just immersing myself in that Gothic landscape is nice. And I've been listening to this podcast with it. It's called Storytime. Wait, what is it called? Storytime for Grownups, I think, where the podcast host, who's a former teacher, will walk through the different chapters and help break it down and give some analysis. And that's just, it's a nice thing to listen to while I'm washing the dishes. And then I always go back. This is kind of embarrassing, but I always go back to reading like

IFS books, internal family systems. Do you know anything about that world? Not to digress us too much. Okay. It's a modality of therapy that I really, really enjoy that helps ground me. And I do these workbooks that I go back to and it really, really helps me. Whatever works. Yeah. Yeah. How about you? Same stuff I've mentioned. I go to sci-fi fantasy. I watch a lot of anime and just turn my brain off. Love it.

All right, before we go, we're going to leave you with this week's answer to the Make Me Smart question, which is, what's something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about? A few weeks ago, I mentioned an article about the power of weightlifting by a writer named Casey Johnson. As one of my Make Me Smiles, she is the author of the new book, A Physical Education, How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting. So we asked Casey to answer the Make Me Smart question, and here's what she said.

I thought I knew how my nervous system worked. Brains send signals to muscles, muscles move. But what I found out is that there's much more interplay between brain and body than we've long thought. Exercise, especially something like strength training, literally helps neurons grow and improves the response and connection, not just between your brain and muscles, but across your muscles working together.

Not only that, but your muscles send signals back to your brain and foster a type of growth that scientists are still studying. It may turn out that, just like you might do a Sudoku to help stave off brain aging, you might lift weights to stave off brain aging, too. I just wrote my to-do list to make an appointment for an exercise class.

Lift weights. All right. One more quick thing before we wrap up today. Next week, because I'm obsessed with it, we are going to spend a whole week diving into the GOP's reconciliation bill, a.k.a. the one big, beautiful bill act.

Which is still moving through Congress. The Senate's got it right now. But we want to hear your questions about it because it's massive. There's a ton of components to it. And if you have a question about a particular provision that you've heard about or what it would do to the economy or what it would mean for a certain program, we're going to bring in some experts to help us out. Leave us a voicemail at 508-UBSmart. You can email us at makemesmart at marketplace.org. We want to hear what you want to know.

This episode of Make Me Smart was produced. Did I do it early? A little bit. That's okay. Keep going. All right. This episode of Make Me Smart was produced by Courtney Bergseeker with help from Minju Park. Today's program was engineered by Jake Cherry with mixing from Becca Weinman.

Ben Talladay and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our supervisory senior producer is Daisy Palacios. Nancy Farghali is executive producer of Marketplace. And on Tuesdays, Marketplace's vice president and general manager is Neil Scarborough. I feel like I have to carry on the tradition. Yeah, you kind of have to. Yeah, for sure. Hi, I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director, and I'm excited to be joining the hosts of our flagship podcast, Uncanny Valley.

It's a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. It's hosted by some amazing Wired writers and editors, where each week they discuss the influence of technology and culture from the Valley on our everyday lives. But we're also adding another episode to that feed, hosted by me. Each week, I'll have an urgent conversation with one of our extremely busy Wired reporters or editors about this week in news.

Our journalists are constantly asking smart questions to find out where they lead and to help you understand where the world is going a little bit better. I hope this new weekly episode does just that. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.