The weakening value of a college degree: an analysis
- Cormac Lapolla
- Sep 2
- 2 min read
Many college students have worked tirelessly in education since they were three years old but can’t seem to find an adequate job right now. Why is this? Is the value of a degree dwindling? Is there too much competition in the workforce?
It all stems from the annual release of thousands of college students around the United States. According to Forbes, 7% more of the 2024 population is enrolled in college than in 2014. This represents about one million more college students applying for the same amount of jobs. However, one could make the argument that there are even fewer possible jobs currently because of AI who is taking many manufacturing, data analysis, and customer service careers. Therefore, there are almost 1 million more college graduates every year competing for fewer jobs than existed in 2014, creating a large number of unemployed young people with meaningless degrees. Unfortunately, this distortion will only increase until the American ideal of a college degree is altered, or more jobs that require college education are created.
Some of the problem also stems from college education because the career searching time period begins in college, where many students are already unsure of what they want to do. A 2023 college pulse survey by LendEDU study even saw that less than 50% of college students are confident in their career path and capabilities to find a job that matches their hard work. In fact, 40% of college graduates claim they were not properly prepared for their post-graduate endeavors in college. This leaves hundreds of thousands of college graduates who either graduate with an unfirm grasp of what they want to do, or an inadequate level of understanding of the field they wish to pursue.
This phenomenon makes even less sense considering how expensive colleges are in the United States. In Europe, college tuition is around $10,000 USD, but in the US, tuition is on average within $20,000-46,000 USD. So, that begs the question: why are Americans still paying so much for college if the degrees are practically useless?
