College loses its monopoly on the American Dream
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Whether framed on an office wall, collecting dust in a box or still a distant dream, the college diploma is getting a hard reappraisal.
Why it matters: College was once sold as a ticket to the American dream. But students today are taking a tougher look at the college tradeoff: burdensome debt and no guarantee of a dream career — or employment at all, as AI threatens the jobs the degrees were meant to unlock.
"People didn't ask whether college mattered 20 years ago," says Courtney Brown, the vice president of impact and planning at Lumina Foundation. Now, "they're asking: Are today's students going to be prepared for tomorrow's jobs? Is it really helping them out?"
- Confidence in higher education slipped among both parties and all levels of educational attainment this year, according to June Gallup polling.
- Job market fears are also surging: Gallup found just 19% of those with a college degree or more said it was a good time to find a quality job at the end of 2025, compared to 35% of those without one.
But there's a college confidence paradox: Even as Americans sour on higher education, they keep sending their kids to campus.
- "There is still massive pressure on them from their high schools, the educators at their schools, their parents, their peers, and just the broader culture to still go to college," says The Up & Up founder and Gen Z researcher Rachel Janfaza.
The anxiety isn't new — but the reality is. Today's concerns fall into three big buckets:
- 💵 Affordability: "I didn't want to take out loans, and I didn't want to put my family through that stress of trying to fund it," says Gabriel Sheahan, a 24-year-old studying welding and fabrication at Lincoln Technical Institute, a trade school in New Jersey.
- 🏛️ Getting your money's worth: "How does it make sense that you're giving me this deadline to have my degree finished, and I can't even get the classes that I want? I'm in so much competition with all these people. It feels ... like a rat race," Rachel Sukkar, a 19-year-old philosophy major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says.
- 🎓 Outcomes: "There's just so much volatility, and you can't guarantee the same amount of success that you could 20 years ago with a college degree now," says Moksha Agrawal, a 17-year-old incoming high school senior.
Zoom out: Vocational and trade programs provide an alternative route.
- Sheahan notes that welding is hard work, but he's already completed key industry certifications and can picture a clear, stable career path.
- "The trades have been so demonized over the last 30 years that everybody wants to either now be a TikTok star, an influencer, a Jeff Bezos," he says. Still, "there's such a high percentage of kids that get out of college and whatever degree they have ... they never will work in it."
The bottom line: High schools and colleges need to adapt to the changing job market, Janfaza says, giving more weight to extracurriculars and soft skills.
- And just like the savvy shopper reads reviews, students need to see real results from institutions to prove their worth.
- "It's not a marketing campaign — I'm not saying go make another billboard," Brown tells Axios. "But show it really in the outcomes of your students."
