Why Americans are Losing Faith in College

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Twenty years ago, higher education was one of the most trusted institutions in America. Today, confidence in higher ed is falling among every demographic: young and old, men and women, Republicans and Democrats, those who didn't finish high school and those with framed PhDs on their wall. And it’s not just attitudes. In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities across the U.S. Last year, there were about 15 million undergrads. That’s a decline of roughly 16 percent. In a recent essay for the New York Times, author Paul Tough, who’s published several excellent books about college in America, wrote: “Americans have turned away from college at the same time that students in the rest of the world have been flocking to campus. Why?” Today’s guest is Paul Tough. We talk about why a noxious stew of economics, culture, and inequality has turned a surprising number of Americans against college. Who’s to blame, and what happens next? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Paul Tough Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Did you know I've had my podcast for 15 years? Do you know that it is the
0:04.7	most downloaded sports podcast of all time? Did you know I have guests from the sports world,
0:10.1	from the culture world, people who work for the ringer, people outside the ringer, celebrities,
0:15.6	experts? You name it. It's on my podcast three times a week, late Sunday night, late Tuesday night,
0:22.0	late Thursday night. The Bill Simmons podcast, check it out on Spotify.
0:27.0	In 2008, I graduated with a degree in journalism and I entered the labor market.
0:33.6	This is a time when the economy was falling apart. Everybody was going around
0:37.6	freaked out about the world, pretending to know what a collateralized debt obligation actually was.
0:43.3	It was a terrible time to enter the workforce. So a lot of my peers, the old millennial,
0:49.2	geriatric millennial micro generation, didn't go into the labor market at all. They went to grad school.
0:57.2	They could have worked, but they said, no, more school for me.
1:02.0	This was a period in American life where more school, more college, was a good answer to just
1:10.1	about every question. And the numbers bore this out. People with associate degrees clearly earned more
1:17.0	than high school grads. People with bachelor's degrees clearly earned more than people who just
1:22.4	went to community college. People with masters earned more. People with advanced degrees earned
1:27.1	even more, more college, more money. That was the formula. And it created this sense that college
1:33.4	flatly worked. In fact, it might have been the last American institution to flatly work.
1:39.2	Trying to think about what American institutions were like, you know, in the milieu in the
1:42.4	2000s. Baseball, you know, steroidal mess. The banks clearly broken. College, college worked.
1:49.7	In one poll, 2009, 96% of parents who identified as Democrats said they expected their kids to attend
1:58.0	college, among Republican parents, 99% said they expected their kids to go to college. In a country
2:06.0	where you cannot get 90% of the public to agree about anything, basic historical events,
	...

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