U.S. College Education Isn’t Worth Price: Survey
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 10:31PM BLOOMBERG
Higher education fails to provide students “good value” for the money they and their families spend, more than half of U.S. adults said in a survey.
The debate over higher education’s value “has been triggered not just by rising costs but also by hard economic times,” according to a report released yesterday by the Washington-based Pew Research Center. The organization, an independent research group funded by Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, surveyed 2,142 adults, aged 18 and older, from March 15 through March 29.
The survey follows a call by President Barack Obama for the U.S. to achieve the highest college graduation rate in the world by 2020. The U.S. now ranks 12th among 36 developed nations, according to a report last year by the College Board.
In the poll, 75 percent of U.S. adults said college was unaffordable for most Americans, and almost half said that student loans had made it harder to pay other bills.
At the same time, 86 percent of college graduates said that it had been a good investment for them personally. College graduates said they earned an average $20,000 a year more because of their degrees, a figure that closely matches U.S. Census Bureau data, the survey found.
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