Original Article By Mark Swanson
More than 6 in 10 registered voters say a four-year college degree is not worth the cost, according to a new NBC News poll.
Just 33% say a four-year degree is worth it — a drop of 20 points since June 2013, according to the survey released Friday.
Meanwhile, the share who say a college degree is no longer a good value has surged to 63%, a 23-point jump over the past 12 years.
The 20-point slide over the past 12 years — from 53% in 2013 to just 33% today saying a degree is worth the cost — shows up across nearly every demographic group.
But the shift is most dramatic among Republicans, according to the poll results.
A decade ago, Republicans were fairly positive about higher education: 55% said a four-year degree was worth it and 38% disagreed.
In the latest poll, that picture is reversed. Only 22% of Republicans now see a degree as worthwhile, while 74% say it no longer is.
Overall, the majority surveyed say they agree that college is “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off,” according to the poll.
The shift in attitudes can be attributed to the cost of college.
Adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows the average in-state tuition at public four-year colleges has doubled since 1995, while tuition at private four-year institutions has climbed 75% over the same period, NBC News reported.
“Some people drop out, or sometimes people end up with a degree that is not worth a whole lot in the labor market, and sometimes people pay way too much for a degree relative to the value of what that credential is,” Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told NBC News.
He added, “These cases have created enough exceptions to the rule that a bachelor’s degree always pays off, so that people are now more skeptical.”
NBC News surveyed 1,000 registered voters from Oct. 24-28. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points.
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