Poll: US college degrees losing value

A majority of US citizens think a college degree isn't worth the cost, according to a new poll.

The Wall Street Journal survey released on Friday, which was conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, found 56 percent of US citizens believe earning a four-year degree isn't worth the cost, with skepticism strongest among people aged 18-34.

In 2013, 53 percent of US citizens were bullish on college, and 40 percent weren't. In 2017, 49 percent of respondents thought a four-year degree would lead to good jobs and higher earnings, compared with 47 percent who didn't.

People with college degrees are among those whose opinions have dropped the most, with 42 percent of them saying that it wasn't worth it, up more than 10 percentage points from the two polls last decade.

Paulo Eskitch, a 47-year-old violinist who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, told the Journal that he is less emphatic about whether his daughter, now 7, should enroll in college when the time comes.

Eskitch said he has a master's degree in music and earns about $30,000 a year playing in several different orchestras. He said a degree has become necessary in his field, but he sometimes wishes he had pursued welding as a career because he thinks he could have made more money.

That said, he anticipates supporting his daughter if she decides to pursue higher education because there aren't enough good alternatives.

"There are some fields you just can't enter unless you have a college degree," he said. "I'm not saying that's right, but it's the way it is."

The survey showed that women and older US people are driving the decline in confidence for going to college. People over the age of 65 with faith in college declined to 44 percent from 56 percent in 2017.Confidence among women fell to 44 percent from 54 percent, according to the poll.

"These findings are indeed sobering for all of us in higher education, and in some ways, a wake-up call," Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which counts more than 1,700 institutions of higher education as members, told the Journal. "We need to do a better job at storytelling, but we need to improve our practice, that seems to me to be the only recipe I know of regaining public confidence."

Mitchell said student debt, which has reached $1.7 trillion, and the 60 percent graduation rate at four-year colleges are two of the biggest problems undermining confidence in the sector.