Is College Worth the Cost?

Some thoughts on a recent Gallup poll

After reading an essay, by the indispensable John Carter, about the decline of public confidence in universities, I took a little trip to the website of the Gallup organization. There I found the article, Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply, that had provided Mr. Carter with the text for his meditation. I also found a piece called Current College Students Say Their Degree is Worth the Cost.

The latter article analyzes the results of a poll that asked people attending schools for young adults to compare the benefits they are gaining against the price that they are paying. In particular, the poll asked students enrolled in particular colleges to rate the degree to which they agreed with the following statement: “the education I am receiving at [name of the university attended] is worth the cost.”

A little more than a third of the respondents ticked the box that indicated “strong agreement” with the statement. That is, in the language of Uber, Amazon, and Yelp, they gave the statement five stars. Of the remainder of the people polled, a little more than half (and thus another third of the total) awarded four stars to the statement and half gave lower grades.

The authors of Current College Students Say Their Degree is Worth the Cost interpreted the combination of five- and four-star votes as a sign that two-thirds of college students were satisfied with their purchase. I wonder, however, if people who live in an age in which a four-star rating is often used to express deep disappointment would see things the same way. To put things more bluntly, if college were an Uber driver, it would be fired.