Is College Still Worth It? Confidence in Higher Education Erodes

In 2015, 57% of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education. Today it’s 38%. That’s not a dip. That’s an entire generation deciding, one skeptical eyebrow at a time, that the deal it was sold might not be a good one.

A Decade of Slipping Faith

Gallup’s confidence-in-higher-ed numbers read like a long, uneven descent with one false summit. Confidence bottomed out at 36% in 2024, ticked back up to 42% in mid-2025 — enough for a few op-eds about a corner being turned — and then gave almost all of it back, falling to 38% by 2026. When people are asked why they’ve soured, the same three answers keep surfacing: perceived political agendas on campus (31%), the cost of attending (30%), and a sense that colleges aren’t actually preparing graduates for work (25%). Nobody says college is worthless. They say it costs too much for what it delivers, and increasingly, they mean it as more than a talking point.

The perceived importance of a degree has followed the same trajectory, hitting new lows alongside the confidence numbers. That distinction matters: this isn’t just cynicism about administrators or campus politics. It’s a growing number of Americans concluding the credential itself no longer reliably pays for itself.

“A four-year degree used to be a bet you made once. Now it’s a bet you keep paying interest on for twenty years, whether or not it paid off.”

The Bill Came Due, and Kept Coming

The math behind the skepticism isn’t hard to find. Americans now owe $1.87 trillion in student loan debt, federal and private combined — up 3.3% year over year — with $1.69 trillion of that sitting on the federal government’s books across 42.8 million borrowers. That balance has now grown in every fiscal quarter since 2022, meaning the debt pile isn’t stabilizing; it’s compounding again after a brief pandemic-era pause.

Enrollment tells the matching story from the other direction. Undergraduate enrollment peaked at roughly 18.1 million students in 2010 and fell to about 15.4 million by 2023 — a 13% decline. There’s been a modest rebound since, with fall 2025 enrollment climbing back to around 16.2 million, but that still leaves total enrollment about 7% below its 2010 high. Fewer people are choosing the four-year path, even as the ones who do choose it borrow more than any cohort in American history to get there.

A Rational Response to an Irrational Price

What’s striking is how little of this reads as anti-intellectualism. It reads as arithmetic. Tuition has outpaced wage growth for decades, degree-holders increasingly compete with each other for jobs that didn’t used to require a diploma at all, and a trillion-dollar debt overhang sits as a visible, google-able warning label at the top of every financial aid conversation a teenager has with their parents. People aren’t losing faith in learning. They’re losing faith in a specific financial product that used to reliably outperform its cost, and increasingly doesn’t.

The Index tracks this because higher education has functioned as America’s primary mobility engine for three generations. When confidence in that engine falls this far, this fast, it isn’t just a campus story — it’s a signal that one of the country’s core promises is quietly being renegotiated downward.