Families are asking more targeted questions about what a college education delivers after graduation.
getty
Americans have rarely sounded more skeptical about college. But when it comes to their own children, they are having a harder time walking away.
Just 31% of U.S. adults now say a college education is “very important,” according to a new Gallup poll, down from 70% when Gallup asked the same question in 2013. Meanwhile, the share who say college is “not too important” has nearly quintupled, from 6% to 29%. The survey, conducted Aug. 3-24 among 1,200 adults, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Yet the collapse in enthusiasm for college hasn’t produced a comparable decline in demand. Parents still overwhelmingly want education beyond high school for their children, college enrollment is growing and applications continue to rise. The disconnect suggests Americans may not be giving up on college so much as becoming more skeptical about what it costs—and more demanding about what they get in return.
“I don’t think Americans are walking away from education after high school. They are becoming much more conditional about it,” Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation, tells Forbes. “People are less willing to assume that college is automatically the right answer for everyone.”
Despite widespread concerns about cost and the value of a degree, 38% of parents with children under 18 said in a separate Gallup-Lumina Foundation survey this summer that they would most like their child to attend a four-year college immediately after high school. Another 19% preferred a two-year or community college and 17% favored a job-training or certification program. Altogether, 74% wanted some form of postsecondary education for their children, virtually unchanged from a year earlier.
“I don’t think American’s are walking away from education after high school. They are becoming much more conditional about it.”
And students themselves have not stopped showing up. U.S. undergraduate enrollment grew 1.3% this spring to 15.5 million students, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Public four-year enrollment increased 1.5%, while community college enrollment reached 5.8 million—5.2% higher than in spring 2021.
Applications are rising, too. More than 1.5 million students submitted first-year applications through the Common App during the 2025-26 cycle, up 2% from the previous year. Total applications jumped 6% to nearly 10.8 million.
The tension becomes easier to understand when cost and quality are separated. Only 12% of Americans say four-year colleges do a good or excellent job providing an affordable education. Yet half still rate them positively for providing a quality education.
“Cost is clearly a major concern, but this isn’t only about affordability,” Brown says. “People are also asking harder questions about outcomes, career preparation and whether a credential will create enough value to justify the investment.”
That focus on what comes after graduation is something John Pollard, dean of the University of Arizona’s Franke Honors College, hears directly from families. “If you talk to parents, which I do all the time, the bottom line is they want their students to be employable,” he says, or they want them to be able to get into a graduate program that puts them on a path toward a profession.
Another explanation for the disconnect: Even as Americans question the value of college, the economic advantages associated with earning a degree haven’t disappeared. As of midyear, the unemployment rate for college grads aged 22 to 27 was 5.7%, compared to 4.1% for all workers. So why go to college? Because the unemployment rate for all workers aged 22 to 27, including those without a college degree, was 7.2%.
Moreover, even as the real cost of college has continued to climb, the college wage premium—that is, the additional earnings associated with having a degree—stopped widening after doubling in the 1980s and 1990s. But it hasn’t disappeared. In the second quarter, the median earnings of all full-time American workers 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree but no graduate degree, came to $1,628 a week, compared with $994 for workers with a high school diploma but no college.
That doesn’t mean students aren’t looking for alternatives to the traditional four-year degree. Public two-year colleges with a strong vocational focus accounted for 19.5% of all public two-year enrollment in fall 2024, up from 15.3% in 2019, before the pandemic, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. And the growth has continued: By spring 2025, enrollment at vocationally focused public two-year colleges had reached 871,000 students, up about 12% from the previous spring. Preliminary fall 2025 data also showed continued growth in specific trade fields, including mechanic and repair technologies. But the growth in career-focused programs hasn’t come with a wholesale retreat from four-year colleges.
In other words, families may still want their kids to go to college. They just aren’t willing to assume that any college, at any price, is a good investment. The apparent contradiction may also reflect the questions Americans are being asked. The just-released Gallup poll asks broadly, “How important is a college education today?” The Gallup-Lumina research poses a more specific question about the importance of a degree to career success. And in that survey, nearly three-quarters of adults without a college degree said earning a two- or four-year degree was at least as important for career success as it was 20 years ago.
For parents and students, that may make the increasingly loud debate over whether college is “worth it” too broad to be useful. As Brown says, “The question now is much more, ‘Is this the right path, at the right price, and will it lead somewhere?’”
Students don’t necessarily have to choose the cheapest college. But they should understand what they’re paying extra for. A more expensive school might make sense because it offers substantially better financial aid, unusually strong programs in a student’s field, better graduation rates or career opportunities that justify the additional cost.
And for colleges, Brown says, the message is more pointed. “Colleges shouldn’t focus on convincing people that college is worth it. They need to make sure it is worth it,” she says. That means controlling costs, being transparent about outcomes and connecting education more clearly to work and opportunity.
“The important shift is that higher education can no longer assume the public will take its value on faith,” Brown says. “The burden of proof has shifted.”
Want to be more successful? Subscribe to the weekly Forbes Careers newsletter to get insider tips and insights.
Leave a comment