By Frank F Islam & Ed Crego, August 5th, 2025 (Image credits: Tom de Boor, JNCGPT40)

Since returning to office on January 20, Donald Trump and his administration have launched an unprecedented and unwarranted attack on higher education that will do considerable damage. Unfortunately, in this century, the higher education establishment has done considerable damage to itself.

Public Opinion and Views on Higher Education

At one time, higher education was held in uniformly high regard. Today, for a variety of reasons, this is no longer the case. The expectations regarding it are much lower.

Surveys in 2024 by Gallup and the Pew Research Center (Pew) revealed that the public’s views on the importance and value of higher education are definitely falling.

A Gallup survey, conducted in partnership with the Lumina Foundation, and released in July, revealed a substantial drop in confidence in higher education. Jeffrey Jones begins his article highlighting the findings of that survey, stating:

An increasing proportion of U.S. adults say they have little or no confidence in higher education. As a result, Americans are now nearly equally divided among those who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence (36%), some confidence (32%), or little or no confidence (32%) in higher education. When Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, 57% had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence and 10% had little or none.

A separate report from the Gallup-Lumina survey, released in July as well, disclosed that:

About half of Americans (48%) say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in community colleges. Confidence in community colleges is higher than confidence in four-year colleges and universities, as one-third of Americans report high levels of confidence in four-year institutions.

The report on the Pew survey findings, released in May of last year, reinforce the downward trend of public opinion on higher education. Key overall findings from that survey include the following:

• Only one-in-four U.S. adults say it’s extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree in order to get a well-paying job in today’s economy.
• Roughly half (49%) say it’s less important to have a four-year college degree today in order to get a well-paying job than it was 20 years ago.
• Only 22% say the cost of getting a four-year college degree today is worth it even if someone has to take out loans.
• Among four-year college graduates, only about a third (32%) say college is worth the cost even if someone has to take out loans.

The Shrinking Value of Higher Education

Paul Tough, who has written several books on inequality and education, addresses the issue of cost directly in his September 5, 2023 New York Times article, “Americans are Losing Faith in the Value of Higher Education. Whose Fault is That?” Tough examine the reasons for that loss of faith and who is at fault in detail in this excellent article, drawing upon a variety of expert sources.

In his piece, Tough highlights that one of the primary factors is the soaring cost for a student to go to college today. He points out that

Since 1992, the sticker price has almost doubled for four-year private colleges and more than doubled for four-year public colleges, even after adjusting for inflation. Today the average total cost of attending a private college, including living expenses, is about $58,000 a year. After financial aid, the average net price for private-college students is about $33,000 a year; at public institutions, it is about $19,000.

He draws upon the work of three researchers, Lowell Ricketts, William Emmons, and Ana Hernandez Kent, from the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, to demonstrate how this increase in costs has significantly reduced the value of the return on an investment in a college degree for many college graduates.

These researchers developed the concept “college wealth premium” to describe the difference between what a college graduate earns and what she or he owes due to student debt, compared to the wealth of a high school graduate. When they did the research applying that concept, they found that:

• For those older college graduates born before 1980 on average the college wealth premium was considerable (2 to 3 times more wealth) compared to the wealth of high school graduates from that same time period.
• For those younger college graduates born in the 1980’s, on average the wealth premium was small to virtually nonexistent compared to their high school graduate counterparts and would be continue to be so going forward.
• Looking at those younger graduates who had gone on to get a post graduate degree, the wealth premium was “…indistinguishable from zero.”

Based upon their analysis, Rickets, Emmons, and Kent concluded, “Our results suggest that college and postgraduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment.”

When Ricketts was asked by Tough what accounted for their findings, he responded, “the likely culprit for this was cost: the rising expense of college and the student debt.”

Tough also obtained insights on the chances of securing a good return on the college investment from Douglas Webber, a former professor at Temple University, who is now a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Board. According to Tough, Webber’s economic research and data analysis disclosed that:

If you choose a business or STEM degree, your chance of winning the college bet goes back up to 3 in 4, even if you’re paying $50,000 a year in tuition and expenses while you’re in college. But if you’re majoring in anything else — arts, humanities or social sciences — your odds turn negative at that price; worse than a coin flip. In fact, if your degree is in the arts or humanities, you’re likely to lose the bet even if your annual college expenses are just $25,000.

On December 7, 2023, the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity (CESO) at the Brookings Institution hosted a virtual panel to discuss whether College is still worth it. Paul Tough was one of the panelists. The others were: David Deming, Harvard University Professor of Political Economy; Stephanie Cellini, George Washington University Professor Public Policy and Economics; and Denisa Gandara, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas, Austin.

In the conclusion of her commentary summarizing the panel discussion, Gabriela Goodman notes, the consensus among the panelists was:

College is worth it for most people, with some caveats. Institution type and area of study both impact the returns to college, as do academic preparation and risks associated with not completing a degree.

The Need to Improve the Value of Higher Education

Tough’s article, and the Brookings panel, demonstrate that in 2025 there is a need to improve the value of higher education. Although that need has intensified, it is definitely not new.

The need has existed for some time but it has not been addressed satisfactorily. We wrote about this in our blog, “The Compelling Need to Improve the Higher Education Value Equation,” posted a little more than a decade ago, in 2014, in which we stated:

The value received from higher education can and should take a number of forms including: intellectual, developmental, psychic, experiential, associational, attitudinal, emotional, and financial.

But,in these tough times for the American economy, combined with the increasing costs of higher education and the decreased funding support from state and local governments, which means that many students must bear a larger burden in paying for their own education, the bottom-line metrics such as graduation, gainful employment, and meaningful salaries/wages must be taken in account. In fact, in our opinion, these measures should always have been part of an accountability framework for institutions of higher education.

That said, how is higher education stacking up?

We will not go into the details that we presented back then, but essentially what they showed was that higher education overall was doing very poorly on the bottom-line metrics. If it would have been given a grade, it would have been a D- or an F.

We closed that 2014 blog declaring:

Many students — especially those who are first time college attendees and from middle to lower income backgrounds — go to college as an article of faith. Without adequate information, education or protections, too many of those students become involved in an unintentional act of charity — giving their money away to an institution of higher education and getting nothing tangible in return. This diminishes their hope for the future.

This must be made unacceptable. It is much more than a question of value. It is a question of values. It is a question of who and what matters to us as a society and our institutions of higher education.

Sadly, one decade after our declaration, this “unacceptable” condition continues.

Paul Tough examined the current status of inequalities in his article on the value of higher education. One of the expert sources he used was research by economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and David Deming, who “examined admissions practices among what they call Ivy Plus colleges (the Ivy League plus a few comparably selective institutions) and found a pervasive pattern of affirmative action for the very wealthy.”

Based upon this and other relevant findings, near the end of his piece Tough writes:

For the nation’s more affluent families (and their children), the rules of the higher education game are clear, and the benefits are almost always worth the cost. For everyone else, the rules seem increasingly opaque, the benefits are increasingly uncertain and the thought of just giving up without playing seems more appealing all the time.

In the CESO-Brookings Institution panel discussion, Tough said, “The system is not fair.” Panelist David Deming concluded that “Our college institutions are in desperate need for reform.”

Thoughts on Improving the Value of Higher Education

We concur with Deming’s opinion and suggest that reform should be customer-centered. We proposed a customer-centered approach to reforming higher education in a blog we wrote in 2012, in which we called for:

New “business models” and actionable approaches to enable higher education to do a much better job in creating value for its customers — i.e., students. We recommended that be accomplished by focusing on the following areas which impact the value equation for students: college costs; graduation and placement rates; return on investment; and career education and skill development.

The CESO-Brookings Institution panel discussion indicates that those areas in need of improvement or enhancement remain as relevant in 2025 as they were in 2012. The commentary on that discussion reports that:

The panelists described a number of approaches to increasing the returns to college and improving college completion rates. Cellini mentioned initiatives to hold schools accountable for their students’ outcomes. Both Cellini and Tough proposed efforts to make information about financial aid and college choices more easily accessible and digestible, though Tough argued that some policy discussions have over-emphasized helping individual students navigate a too-complex system at the expense of more systematic change that would make higher education fairer. Deming suggested expanding government subsidies to make college more affordable. The panelists agreed that community colleges require more funding.

The panelists also pointed out the value of community colleges, which are oftentimes a more affordable option than traditional four-year colleges. And two of the panelists cited the potential benefits of “stacking” credentials, meaning using multiple educational programs such as vocational training and traditional degrees to build a more comprehensive skill set and knowledge base.

Put it all together and those involved with and concerned about the future of higher education in America are still trying to put it all together to solve the higher education value equation. If there were an AI program that would generate an algorithm to do that equitably, it would be worth its weight in the currency it would save students and the sustainable benefits it would generate for higher educational institutions and our society.

The Pivotal Importance of Higher Education

Seriously, higher education is one of the pillars upon which our U.S. democracy is built. It has made pivotal contribution to the development of this great nation and its citizens. It has done so in the past. We must ensure that it has the capacity to do so in the future.

The higher educational system in the United States of America was established with the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862. We cited the Morrill Act as one of the critical pivot points in American history in our book, Working the Pivot Points: To Make America Work Again published in 2013 (Pivot Points) .

In our discussion of the Morrill Act in Pivot Points we note that:

In the mid-19th century, higher education in the United States was provided by private colleges almost exclusively to the wealthy and elite. Several politicians and educators, however, wanted to make advanced education more easily available to the average American. The Morrill Act, which called for establishing “land grant” colleges, was drafted for this purpose.

The Morrill Act drove the creation of the U.S. public higher education system. Today, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) has nearly 230 members, including: 78 U.S. land-grant institutions, 21 of which are among the 23 historically black colleges and universities that are APLU members.

In Pivot Points we observe:

The U.S. higher education system is the envy of the world. The Morrill Act ensured that there was an opportunity for advanced education for all. The importance of the land grant colleges to the growth of America and the American dream is incalculable and the nation’s success without them is unfathomable.

If there had been no Morrill Act, the U.S. educational system would most likely have been a network of exclusive islands for the rich and privileged. Millions of American citizens would have been deprived of higher education and the costs to the American society in terms of the lost intellectual and economic capital are inestimable.

New publications this year from the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provide both good news and bad news about the costs and value of higher education.

In his article for the Brookings Institution, Philip Levine reports, based upon a detailed examination of college costs for the academic year 2024-2025, that:

Inflation-adjusted college prices are falling over the past 5 to 10 years for virtually all students enrolled at public and private colleges and universities. Only high-income students at private institutions with very large endowments pay more now than they did a decade ago. No other group of students at any other type of institution faces an increased cost. Most of them now pay less.

That’s the good news. The bad news from Levine is:

But that does not mean that college is broadly affordable. Whether or not a student whose family earns $300,000 or more per year can afford a $90,000 price tag is an open question. But at many institutions, families earning $40,000 are still expected to come up with $15,000 to $20,000 per year. It seems clear that amount is not affordable.

In their two-part posting for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Jaison R. Abel and Richard Dietz observe that college is worth it for many students, but not worth it for others.

In Part I of their piece, Abel and Dietz examine the costs, benefits, and return on investment of getting a college degree, and near end of the post conclude “The typical college graduate earns a return that easily surpasses the benchmark for a sound investment.” They stress that by that their estimate is for “the typical graduate paying the average costs over four years of school and earning the median college wage upon completion.”

In Part II, after examining factors such as the price paid, time to get a degree, and college major, Abel and Dietz reaffirm the value of higher education for many students, but observe, “However, as many as a quarter of college graduates appear to end up in relatively low-paying jobs, and for them, a college degree may not be worth it, at least in terms of the economic payoff.”

In conjunction, the Brookings and Federal Reserve Bank studies demonstrate the cost and value of higher education remain problematic.

If higher education costs continue to be too expensive for the majority of Americans, and no systemic plans have been put in place to support those of lesser means, higher education is moving backward toward becoming primarily the province of the rich and privileged.

Unless something is done to reverse this retrograde movement, millions of American citizens will be deprived of higher education and the costs to the American society in terms of the lost intellectual and economic capital will be inestimable.

There is a need for a comprehensive, customer-centered reform of higher education. If there is no reform, the value of higher education and higher education itself will continue to shrink — so too will the American dream.