Flare jeans. Vinyl records. Questionable sideburns. A degree you don’t use at work.

Trends can come back around, and an initially surprising, but perhaps inevitable, evolution in American life this decade has been a sharp turn away from thinking higher education delivers a worthwhile return on investment.

Just look at this Pew Research survey.

The evidence is clear: college graduates outearn, outlive, and even out-marry their non-college educated peers. (For our purposes, we will consider the college-educated those in possession of a four-year degree or higher.)

And yet, the “vibes” have rarely been more anti-establishment, if that establishment is the higher education system. Even the professoriate will grumble that this is not the college experience they envisioned — and if you lose the class who liked college so much they opted to stay in it until they were a good 33 years old, who do you have left?

Let’s explore some angles.

Money, money, money 🤑

The most obvious way the entire electorate is disgruntled with “college” as a category is its almost laughably hockey-stick shaped rise in costs.

     Federal borrowers aged 25 to 34 owe an average debt of $33,081. Debt among 25- to 34-year-olds has increased 4.6% since 2017. 35-      to 49-year-olds owe an average federal debt of $43,238.

Many readers of this blog will either know an adult in one of these categories or be one themselves. Unfortunately, means as ever obscure outliers: lawyers carry much higher debt burdens than average, but typically, they have much higher earning potential.

But whether you’re enrolling in a few evening credits as a single parent trying to eke out a nursing degree or you’re a future journalist who got admitted to Duke but couldn’t swing it on a middle-class background out of state (the latter happened to a friend of mine), no one sane looks at the current state of student loans and thinks, “cool.”

Since we’re about solutions and data here, what can YOU do? We’re not financial planners for college or otherwise, but I highly recommend Jeff Selingo’s Buyers and Sellers list. It’s an Excel spreadsheet that shows you which colleges overcharge for what you get, and which are trying to attract ambitious applicants.

But also, have the discussion with your child about financing their degree. I was extremely fortunate to get a full-tuition scholarship to a private university in my state. But I don’t know if I would have been as motivated as a high school student to prioritize financial ROI if it hadn’t been clear to me that it was going to be on me to finance my bachelor’s.

So, have the talk. Life happens: divorce, failed businesses, eldest child in a large family, state school de-fundings. I remember once chatting with a parent who had gone to my same college, and was shocked a small liberal arts women’s college on the East Coast was a much better financial deal for her daughter than our shared alma mater. Without being open to an unexpected avenue, her daughter would not have had this great option because it wasn’t particularly on her own parents’ radar at first.

You just never know! So research FIRST before your kid “falls in love.” $43,000+ is real money, and even the professional class is starting to wonder if this number reflects the value of the education their children received. (Some of those parents are apparently closer to retirement than college themselves!)

What exactly are they learning?

Few things about higher ed today can shock this author.

This podcast on how college classes don’t assign books did.

Apparently, college curricula really are … changing … and I shared the Millennial host’s befuddlement on how scrolling Instagram or TikTok is a core “reading experience.”

We’ve written about bribing your kids to read. We’re here to help your kids’ reading comprehension. But yeah, a college degree in humanities where you don’t read long texts? Something seems broken.

Again, what’s a parent to do? Ask on the college tour what the curriculum in the humanities are. Encourage your kid to look at the syllabus of the first-year courses they’re interested in. If their desired major is less book-heavy (engineering, or film, etc.), discuss with your student what kind of work that career entails and how they can develop the thinking skills necessary. Don’t let them rot til 3 A.M. on social media.

Do I sound old and cranky? I hope not. But this trend is indeed indicative of the dreaded “dumbing down,” so it’s important to remain vigilant.

Culture clash: who identifies with higher ed culture?

It would be hard to ignore a huge difference in the data — people who self-identify as conservative have much, much less faith in American higher education than self-identified liberals.

We’re not here to tell you how to vote or how to think, but it seems clear that there are probably larger forces at work. College administrators and the sorts of people who write long-form articles about, say, how Père Goriot changed their life (it did! I swear!) are perhaps just more liberal by temperament and flock to college as a safe “bubble.”

But when a writer as middlebrow as David Brooks — the very man who coined the term Bourgeois Bohemian for people who, uh, write Substack blogs while sipping $8 lattes, cough cough — has a cover article in the Atlantic Monthly about the Ivy League breaking the country? Wow.

So, what can you do about this? Probably not much! I do think it can be valuable for a student to be exposed to a world beyond their immediate experience: for the rural small religious school high schooler to try living in a big coastal enclave, and the elite boarding school graduate to spend some time in the kinds of places where jobs have declined since 1972. But ultimately, it appears the reality is that college was always an elite experience — only about a third of Americans have degrees — and the elitism that comes with that is turning a LOT of people off the whole shebang.

Conclusion: Draw Your Own

Whatever you think of David Brooks per se, he’s an example of someone who tries to keep his ear to the ground of capital-C culture, and to me, that’s the entire point of college: not a jobs training program, not for the hoodie with the social status, not even the chance to find a spouse or carry on your parents’ legacy.

It’s to expand your mind through, yes, the greatest works of literature and art and science this civilization, which far predates this nation and hopefully will outlive it, ever produced.

College, if thoughtfully financed and engaged with in person, can help a young adult discover themselves in a way that can absolutely be a positive.

Ask your kid what they think the “point” of their attending college is. Like the return of Laura Palmer bangs and JNCO jeans, their answer might surprise you. But one of the more important things you can do as a parent? Really listen.

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