Gallup: Percentage of People Saying College “Very Important” Sinks To Record Low
Campus culture overwhelmingly is hostile to at least half the country. People are noticing.
Gallup just released a survey showing the percentage of people who consider college “very important” is at the lowest point since Gallup started surveying that question in 1978, Record-Low 31% Say College Education Is ‘Very Important’:
Three in 10 Americans (31%) think a college education is “very important,” four percentage points below last year’s reading, the previous low among the seven times Gallup has asked this question since 1978. As recently as 2013, more than twice as many U.S. adults (70%) said college was very important.
At the same time, the percentage of U.S. adults who say a college education is “not too important” has risen from 6% in 2013 to 29% today, while the percentage saying it is “fairly important” has increased from 23% to 39%.
In the earliest years of Gallup’s trend on this question, those considering a college education to be very important increased sharply from 36% in 1978 to 64% by 1985. In the past decade, the perceived importance of college has plummeted, with those saying it is very important now slightly below its 1978 starting point.
This year, Gallup’s Aug. 3-24 poll finds that the percentage of U.S. adults viewing college as “not too important” nearly matches those rating it “very important.” The 64-point gap between them in 2013 has shrunk to just two points today.
The feeling is very diverse:
The long-term decline spans major demographic groups, even as women, Democrats, people of color and college graduates remain relatively more likely than their counterparts to consider college very important.
This will surprise no one, except perhaps people in academia. It certainly won’t surprise Legal Insurrection readers, because we’ve been decrying the liberal campus bubble for almost two decades.
I recently spoke on this very topic last spring at Cornell Law School, Why have universities become the least free places when they should be the most free?
Why is it that universities have become the least free place in the United States when they should be the most free place?
And that’s what I think we have to examine. And it is absolutely true that higher education, certainly at the so-called elite level, has been captured by one political viewpoint.
The Cornell Sun, I think it was two or three years ago, maybe it was four, I’ve lost track of time at this point, did a couple of surveys and I credit them for this, It was actually a good piece of journalism, where they looked up the political donations of faculty. Now, political donations are not a perfect alignment with Viewpoint, but it’s a rough alignment. And they found, over varying years, and it varied from department to department, but something between 95 and 100 percent, approaching a hundred percent, of the donations from faculty went to Democrats. And there was another survey they did as to. I think, political registration based on voter records. And it was approaching 100 percent Democrat.
Is that a healthy status for a university?
I don’t care if you like Republicans or you don’t like Republicans, they represent about half the country. But on universities, they’re one, two, three percent of the faculty. That’s not a healthy situation.
And it’s least healthy for universities because universities depend, including Cornell as we all know, on public funding tremendously, even private universities. And you are creating a bubble that distances yourself from half the taxpayers who pay your bills, who pay for your classrooms, who pay for everything else through federal aid. It’s not healthy.
One reaction from academia would be to open up to other viewpoints, and in some places that is happening but mostly not. Culture is a hard thing to change, and the campus culture overwhelmingly is hostile to at least half the country.
People are noticing.
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Comments
It’s still probably the best place to go for a gang bang if you’re a f 5 female looking for that kind of action…😄
Then scream rape (see: Cornell).
And yet most women who do this type of disgusting work on Onl% F*ns or similar prono websites consider themselves to be “independent in-control businesswomen” and charge their sick clients whatever per view/month to see such degeneracy. And no r*pe reports, but plenty of substance abuse and multiple sexual partners. I treated some of these people for major depression and bipolar disorder. Not saying that’s the situation at Cornell, but these people have a screw loose somewhere.
It’s the best place to go for a full frontal lobotomy without the surgery bill. Bonus points you get to be in serious debt, have no practical skills, no capacity to cope with the idea that people think differenty than you, no work ethic, and likely you are a giant ignorant bigot. However you can take all of these skills wih you into politics. Just ask AOC.
It now guarantees that young skulls full of mush stay mushy.
The ROI is lousy unless you go hard science or professional. The rest just get crushed by unnecessarily high tuition and fees and the debt it produces.
I remember a friend of mine attending an event being held by a very good, private university located in a small town. The professorial crowd was looking down their noses at the local merchants. My friend asked them why they were speaking like that…..after all those local merchants included their dar dealers, grocers, dry cleaners, clothing retailers, etc. They stopped their arrogant comments.
Unfortunately, like promotes like – the left has spent decades denying tenure to conservative professors. Without federal funds, which they don’t need given some of their endowments and now decreases in students, the chickens are coming home to roost.
No need to deny tenure. Don’t hire them to begin with.
Read a story at another website summarizing the tuition reductions by over 50 colleges designed to both attract and retain current students. In many cases, the reductions in tuition (but not room and board) were over 50%, which is probably closer to the real cost of their education (net of administrative bloat). I will pay for my kids to go to college, but only a good Texas state university unless they get a free ride out of state.
We can thank Obama for saying everyone needed a college education. What a lie.
He meant everybody needed one like his.
One where you spend four years doing whatever you want and nobody else will ever be able to find out exactly what that was.
You can be certain he didn’t get (earned) straight A’s. Otherwise, we would hear about it endlessly.
What I find curious is that basically no one, fellow students or faculty, remembers him.
His college records are as hard to find as pictures of a pregnant “Michelle….”
Every American Jewish mother has said this since before Obama’s parents were born.
One can blame Obama for many things, but that is not one of them.
I really don’t think academia is aware how much most people loath them and their unending arrogance and would love to see a ballot initiative to cut funding. If that wasn’t bad enough the trendline for college enrollment is gonna rapidly fall due to simple demographics. That’s about to start biting university budgets as there’s gonna be less and less students even alive in the coming cohorts to attend …even IF they chose to do so.
Then there’s the little issue with student debt and the total lack of accountability for universities selling students financially worthless degrees in X studies, communications, marketing and so on. Younger kids see their Parents, Uncles, Aunts, older siblings, cousins carrying $50K+ of debt for degree they don’t use to work at Starbucks.
Add the luxury facilities many Universities built to create a ‘college experience’ …those didn’t fall out of the sky. They had to raise $, take on debt to build them. Plus ongoing maintenance/operating costs. Bloated non teaching staff positions add another huge expense.
As AI replaces many entry level jobs and the seemingly unending use of H1B and other visa to suppress hiring of US Citizens for the few lower level jobs that remain viable in an AI environment the appeal of taking on significant debt outside a narrow path of STEM fields loses it’s luster.
Close the schools. Fire the staffs. Raze the buildings. Plow the land. Plant corn.
set flamethrowers to “Send democrats Back To Hell.”
It sounds good but when Mao tried exactly that it didn’t work out so well.
College became important when employers started using a degree requirement as an easy and legally safer way to cull resumes for baseline intelligence and stick-to-itiveness.
Stick-to-it-ive Ness. His brother was Elliott, employed by the Treasury Department.
Though he, himself, was a Stop Oil protestor.
Interestingly enough, as a retired HR guy, Janitor, I can say that you are exactly right. There was a time, many decades ago, when possession of a High School diploma showed that you could assumed to show up reliably, follow basic instructions and that you could be taught how to perform a job.
However, eventually high school failed as a reliable predictor. The next obvious thing was pre-employment testing. However the courts ruled that unless you could show a direct link between the test and the job it is …discriminatory So employers rolled back to the next line of defense: the college diploma. Sadly, the Pell Grant, and guaranteed college loans incentivized colleges to develop programs that catered to people who weren’t really “college material” in the classic sense. So classes which don’t require math, or analysis or logic skills, and finally writing (in the sense of essays) were created. Not surprisingly most of these fall into the sociology field. (In my opinion Sociology can be best compared to watching a waddle of ducks take flight and speculating about why they chose to fly in that particular direction).
This made everyone happy. Mom and Dad have the college graduate they never imagined possible. The kid gets a diploma to wave in front of their friends. The government gets great statistics, and colleges get tons and tons of cash, all paid by the government right on time every month. One small side note here – the moola only keeps rolling in as long as the students keep passing their classes. This is what’s classically referred to as a perverse incentive.
So now, finally, to today: college is no longer a reliable predictor. The latest spin (that I know of anyhow) is the panel interview where the company hopes that at least one panel member can spot bullshit.
I read something about how many upper division college classes have ‘prerequisites’ … 100 and 200-level classes that created the foundation for which the junior or senior is now getting elaboration, building to an actual academic base in his/her subject. no-one was allowed to take those upper division classes who hadn’t taken the required foundational classes.
I read how many classes had prerequisites in the first half 1900s (lots), with those gradually evaporating until today there are very few classes with prerequisites, implying today’s edjimication is a shallow, rudimentary nothing, like the emperor’s new clothes.
because over the decades a college edjimication came to be worth less than prior years, and still worth less each decade until it came to be worthless.
Meanwhile 2 out of 3 of the estimates to build my covered patio were enough to cover time, materials, and a new premium model Tundra. The guys doing it didn’t really ace high school geometry either… which is sort of important because the concrete guy didn’t know how to square off the damn forms and also didn’t know a word of english.
Guy that did the tile for my neighbor’s bathroom claimed to clear (net not gross) close to 300 last year.
yeah- I’d say college is a waste of time for men not want to become Dr, lawyer or engineer.
Sad to say, the academic culture has become corrupt, both financially and culturally. What is the point of spending tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars to send your kid to college to study LGBTQ or women’s studies, become indoctrinated, or major in some field that has no practical application for a career outside the university itself?
A kid can go to a technical school, learn a trade, and earn a damn good living working with their hands.
But for those who want a university education, take a major that has relevance to a career field, hopefully outside of the humanities, where most of the activism lies.
There is so much reform needed, and it has to start with cutting the funding for nonsense courses, nonsense departments, and nonsense positions. What also has to stop is the indoctrination.
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