OK, we didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to deduce the real meaning of this latest Gallup Poll.
It has discovered that recent graduates have serious doubts about whether their college educations were actually worth the immense financial costs that they’re still paying off many years later.
Students’ college debts now total in excess of $ 1.2 trillion and have had dampening effects on a range of issues, including post-graduate discretionary spending, family planning and eventual home-buying.
The finding could be a cautionary tale for the nation’s institutions of higher learning, which have been freely increasing their tuitions at three times the rate of inflation.
No, c’mon now. Who are we kidding? Those places are not going to change their pricing habits as long as the demand for diplomas is so great.
Concerns over the constantly rising costs of college learning are also quite likely to become an evocative political issue with a high pander quotient during these next 13 months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. That’s especially true in these next few primary months when campaigning candidates are the closest to actual voters.
Despite the ongoing controversies, the new Gallup survey found fully half of all U.S. college graduates “strongly agree” that their educations were worth the costs. Public school alumni tend to feel better about their education’s worth (52%) than alums from private schools (47%) where, as you may have noticed, tuitions are larger.
Degree satisfaction dropped sharply, to 26%, among graduates of private for-profit colleges.
However, only 38% of graduates since 2006, those most directly experiencing the stagnant job market of this worst economic recovery since World War II, were satisfied with the value they received from their expensive tuitions.
Here’s another deciding factor in the tuition debates: Whether a college degree actually leads to full-time employment at a wage enabling adequate living and debt repayments.
Marco Rubio, a Republican presidential candidate and part-time college instructor, gets enthusiastic audience responses during his stump speeches these days when urging broad educational reforms starting with newly-relevant university curriculums tied closely to changing job demands.
In case you haven’t noticed, says Rubio, the job market for Greek philosophers has been tight these last 2,000 years.
His reforms would also encourage greater college competition, new forms of accredited learning online and more credit for valid life experiences to guide additional graduates into higher-paying skills and a middle-class life.
Regardless of schools, Gallup found that graduates’ evaluation of their education’s worth increased significantly — in some cases, nearly two-fold — among those who described having regular educational interchanges and relationships with individual faculty members and advisory mentors who displayed care about student interests and progress.
Such attention to customers’ experiences — for instance, a restaurant host going table-to-table checking on diners’ satisfaction — is routine in private enterprise. But apparently that kind of care and concern with customer satisfaction has been an elective course for too many college teachers.
