When We Ask if a College Education Is Worth It, We Are Asking the Wrong Question At Our Own Peril

Again and again, I hear this question raised in public discourse: “Is a college education worth it?”

The frequency of the question registers a growing cultural doubt worth unpacking and addressing because the social and economic—indeed, the human!--stakes are high, and the question itself distorts our understanding of the social role, benefits, and even necessity of higher education. The question itself is a symptom of a deep cultural illness and abiding condition of alienation in American culture, society, and political economy, as I’ll explain.

A recent NBC poll revealed that 63 percent of people believe a bachelor’s degree is “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”

Actual data contradicts this now prevailing belief, indicating college graduates earn hundreds of thousands dollar more over the course of their careers than those with only a high school diploma or less.

Regardless of that truth, though, the question is mis-posed and distracts us from understanding the real value of a college education and the necessity of our population pursuing college educations if the outcome we want is a healthy and effective economy and a humane democratic society.

A better way of approaching the issue, I’d like to suggest, is to reframe the question in two ways.

First, we need to extend and qualify the question by asking, “Is a college education worth it FOR WHOM?”

Relatedly, instead of just looking at the dollar and cents of the current situation, we need to ask, “What can we do to make higher education accessible and affordable?”

Let’s start with the first question, and let me suggest that that a college education is worth it and indeed necessary for all of us collectively if we want a healthy democratic society, a livable planet, and an economy that meets people’s needs.  With all the socjal challenges facing us, imagine we as a society were not educating doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists, agricultural experts, journalists, historians, artists, people who speak multiple languages and understand other cultures, and writers and problem-solvers with a host a disciplinary expertises?

You—we all--need other people with skills, abilities, and knowledge to figure out how we can grow, produce, and distribute enough food to nourish all of us; to keep us healthy and take care of our medical needs; to make sure we have a habitable environment to live in and clean water to drink; to make sure we have energy to cool and warm our homes and fuel our economy; to communicate, write, and inform us about what’s happening in our world; to entertain us with movie, music, and other arts; to think with an understanding of social and cultural history as we develop public policy; and much more. I’m only scratching the surface.

I hope you’re getting the point that having people cultivate the skills and knowledge university educations provide isn’t just a matter of individual interest but of collective interest.

Or, put another way, it is in your individual interest that others receive college educations in broad areas of specialization.

As a professor myself teaching in an urban institution, I often ask students if they have an interest in farming. Few do. The next question I ask is if they have an interest in others learning to farm. They typically stop and think about it, perhaps for the first time, and realize they do.

The question makes them contemplate the inevitable reality that is our dependence on each other to meet our needs, to make our lives possible.

Generally, in my observation, our culture teaches us to think and understand the world in narrowly individualistic terms. People tend to think about their careers and the work they do not in terms of their benefit to or impact on others or their service to the public good, but in terms of their own individual pursuits and interests, the salaries they garner, and hence the kind of life they can enjoy (the house they’ll live in, the care they’ll drive, the vacations they’ll take, where they’ll send their kids to school, and so on).

This individualistic thinking is the hallmark, in my view, of neoliberalism, summed up in Margaret Thatcher’s infamous statement, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” 

This neoliberal mentality encourages us to think about our actions and behaviors—and the work we do in the world—in terms of our private interests, rather than the public good. This same mentality can also blind us to, or excuse, anti-social dimensions of work we engage in that is harmful to others and arguably to the public good (manufacturing cigarettes, polluting the environment, engaging in predatory lending, paying works poverty wages, and so forth).

And this distorted understanding of ourselves as atomized individuals with only private interests fosters the condition of alienation plaguing American society. Not understanding our relationship to and our necessary dependence on the others, that we are social beings, prevents us from recognizing our interest in supporting others and helping them develop themselves, as opposed to competing with them for or trying to deny others resources. We experience others as disconnected from us, isolated from and unrelated to us, at our own peril.

Sadly, neoliberal ideology betrays the vision of the nation’s founders, who insisted the success of the republic would depend on the virtue of each and every individual, by which they meant the commitment of individuals to subordinate their avarice and private ambitions for the sake of the public good (res publica). For our founders, there was such a thing as a society, and our commitment to the social interest, the public good, was the essential and central component of democracy. It was a principle of mutual aid.

When it comes to higher education and the role of universities in U.S. society, it is also important to recognize that this neoliberalist ideology represents a departure from the dominant political, social, and economic thinking that gave rise to public higher education. Think about the large land grant universities (such as flagship state universities) enabled though the Morill Act of 1862. These public institutions were created with the understanding that higher education serves, indeed is vital to, the public good, the social collective. These public institutions transformed higher education beyond a narrow focus on classical education, expanding the focus of universities to include teaching practical agriculture, science, military science, and engineering, in addition to other areas of study.

In short, public higher education was founded on the understanding, the irrefutable reality, that for us to succeed as a society, as a people, we needed to educate people with the technical knowledge and skills and humane sensibilities required to do the work that makes all over lives possible. Looked at in other terms, the founding of public higher education was rooted in an understanding of our dependence on one another to meet our basic needs and in an ethos of mutual aid.

Meeting all of our individual and social needs and addressing all of our social challenges requires we have people with high levels of technical expertise and people who continue to do research into the many problems we have not yet solved, such as cures for diseases or medicines to prevent them. Understanding our world helps us figure out better how to live in it.

So the question we should be asking isn’t really whether or not a college education is worth it; rather, we need to ask:

Can we really afford to have Americans not pursue a college education to develop the skills, knowledge, and imaginations—and do the research—necessary for a successful society and economy that meets our needs and supports our lives, materially, spiritually, and otherwise?

So, the question is, if we cannot afford NOT to have a college-educated population, how do we make college affordable?

Well, the first step is recognizing, or reminding ourselves as a nation of what once common sense to us, that higher education is more of an investment than an expenditure, necessary to the functioning of the nation’s society and economy and to the creation of the nation’s wealth.

If Americans recognized that investing in each other served them, the discussion regarding and approach to tax-funded (not free!) higher education would, I think, be far different.

If we all recognized that private business, organizations, and corporations are basically getting a highly educated workforce for free, really not shouldering a fair share of the investment.

Think about it: individuals pay the cost of training themselves so corporations can benefit from their training.

We have been taught to look at the situation in a rather upside-down way: that private individuals only benefit in this investment in themselves, without recognizing the broader benefits to society and to private organizations, businesses, and corporations. It would make sense for all the beneficiaries of an educated population to bear the costs of this investment.

In tax terms, making higher education available to all is more than doable. It would constitute and economic boom for most Americans. The Trump tax cuts in his Big Beautiful Bill cost about $4.2 trillion over a decade (roughly $400 billion annually), and the bulk of those benefit the wealthiest.

By many estimates, the cost of funding higher education for all, as many nations do, would range from $28 to $58 billion, a fraction of the windfall Trump bestowed on the already-very-wealthy.

Keep in mind that the average American family making les than $100,000 a year will receive a tax benefit of about $600 from the Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

What would you rather have? Tax-funded higher education that would save you tens of thousands of dollars in tuition costs, maybe more, or 600 bucks?

The answer should be obvious, and it should help us change the conversation.

Instead of asking if a college education is worth it, we need to talk about how affordable it is for us as a nation to provide access to higher education for all who seek it.

We have been asking the wrong question, and doing so at our own peril.