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A
This is in conversation from apple news. I'm david green in for shumita basu. Today, is college still worth it? Earlier this year, New Yorker staff writer J. Caspian Kang was doing his taxes with his wife when he started to think about the contributions they were making to their children's college savings accounts. He lives in the Bay Area, where there is a lot of talk about how AI will fundamentally alter higher education. And he wondered what that might mean for his nine year old daughter who will be graduating from high school in 2035.
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B
My question was just like, should I keep contributing to this thing? Is my 9 year old really going to go to college? Or at the very least, is the landscape of higher education going to look very, very different here in 10 years?
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A
This personal inquiry became the premise of
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C
a deeply reported series for the New
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A
York about the viability of the American university system. In it, Jay explores how AI is already impacting higher education. But he also looks at a much broader crisis happening, how factors like demographic shifts, high tuition costs and low public trust in institutions are leading to growing disillusionment with college education and dropping enrollment numbers. And underneath it all, there are pervading questions about the true purpose of higher education and whether colleges and univers are adequately serving that purpose today.
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C
So this all started with a really personal and specific question about whether you should still be contributing to your 9 year old daughter's college fund. Do you feel like in your gut you sort of knew the answer, or was this genuinely a curiosity journey on your part?
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B
Yeah, I would say that 90%, I was like, well, she'll probably go to college, right? 10 years is not that long of a time. And American university system certainly has gone through large changes throughout the past 200 years, but it's still there. But that was actually one of the interesting things to unpack while I was doing the comm, which was like, why did college feel so inevitable for me? For example, I went to College in 1998 and what I found was that basically we have had 50 years now of unstopped growth in higher education and that that for many reasons, but most notably because of demographic shifts in the country is probably coming to an end. And so I think that maybe that 90% was a little bit overindexed by the fact that I and most people that I know have grown up in this era where college just kept growing and growing, the number of people who went to college kept growing and growing, and that the sort of inevitability of young people of some means or who could Graduate from high school, going to college, just kept expanding and expanding.
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C
I have to say, there's your writing got really personal for me at one point because you wrote, would a 15 year old help bent on a journalism career be best served by working himself to the bone, both academically and extracurricular, to get into Harvard? Or should he just start a twitch stream and get to work? Being a journalist who went to Harvard and spent money to go to Harvard for four years, you really got me thinking about today, my job. Was it a valuable four years? And I think the answer is a resounding yes. But I wonder how your thoughts are evolving before we get to sort of the AI questions. What is college for today? And where do you see the gap between what its stated purpose is and the purpose it's actually serving for people?
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B
Well, I mean, when I went to college in 25 years ago, I think that it was much more about at least the narrative that I was told in the narrative that I believe that there was a level of self discovery that would happen. Right. There are two levels of it. So the fundamental level, which was unstated mostly, except I remember I told my parents, like, I don't know if I'm going to go to college. And they're just like, you have to, right?
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C
You will, you will go to college.
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B
The idea was that if you don't go to college, you're just going to fall down the class ladder and you're going to essentially be homeless. Right. Like that's a very hyperbolic way to put it. Certainly wouldn't have been true, but that was the idea that was put in our heads, but it was unstated. Now on top of that there was another layer which was that, well, you have to learn who you are as a human. You have to learn what you want to be in life. Like what is your purpose in life. And if you go to this college and you search and you go through all this knowledge, you meet professors who will help you, then by the end of it, you turn into who you're going to be. Right. Self actualization. I think over the past 25 years that young people have become pretty demystified of that second layer. Right. I think that they see it as a credentialing opportunity and they see it as, I'm going to go here, either my parents or I'm going to go into debt. And then by the end of it I'm going to have a degree that is going to help me get a job and that hopefully that job is going to Push me up the class ladder. Right. And that hopefully this job is going to actually require that I need this degree. The reason why I think that has become much more demystified and that kids are much more eyes wide open about what college actually is for is just because I think that we have much more discourse now about the impact of student loans and the impact of the higher costs of college. I think that the experience of applying to college is much more stressful now than it was 25 years ago for these kids who are competing to get into these top level schools. And so I think when it's just like every waking moment is focused on this goal, you probably do ask yourself a lot more if the pomp and circumstance around that goal actually is true or not. You see this in all this polling data that I looked at, which is that as far back as 2010, when people asked young people, Is a four year degree really important? Somewhere around 70% of people would say yes. Right. Last year, when Pew and Gallup, who are both very reputable sources on all of this and who track it year to year, when they looked at it, it turned out that that number had fallen into the 30s. Right. It had been halved.
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C
Yeah. That people were just not believing that this is a necessary thing to go through financially in terms of the effort and what it actually gives to you.
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B
Right. And mirroring that, in 20, 20, 17 or so, maybe 10 years ago, you had about 70% of people who graduated from high school would go on to some form of higher education. And that was a high water mark. And over the last 10 years that number has dropped down to about 60%. Right. And so you have this shift in the attitudes which is showing somewhat up in the actual number of people who are attending college right now. And so I think that all of that reflects a much more. I don't think cynical is the right word, although I think it's the one that first comes to mind. But I think the right word is maybe transparent and also knowledgeable understanding of what a college degree is actually going to confer to a lot of these kids. And I think that as a result, some of them are choosing just not to do it. Why go into debt? One of the things that I think about is that when I finished college, I went and I got a master's degree in fine arts fiction writing. It costs a lot of money and I went into a lot of debt because of it. And, but at the time in 2002, I wasn't really thinking about the debt that much. It wasn't because I could just afford it and write it off. It was just because I felt like if I got this degree it would better my life and that I would somehow be able to pay it off. Even though writing novels is not something that is generally supposed to pay that type of stuff off.
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C
Right. But whatever it takes, I'll pay it off. It was worth it, no matter what. You never question the value.
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B
And now because of so much of the media, but also studies and academics and also politicians like Joe Biden talking about student debt so much, I think that people have a much better understanding of what student debt actually is. I think that's a positive thing. But I also think it is probably making some people choose not to pursue some of these degrees, which is, we
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should say, is not necessarily a negative. That's a healthy thing to start thinking about. As humans and as a society, do we need this thing to be happy and to support ourselves over time?
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Right. I think that putting 18 year olds into a lot of debt, having institutions that might not be actually telling the truth about the amount of advantage that it's going to give to these kids, having the reality of the workplace for young people right now, where I think that a lot of young people who have four year degrees are in jobs that don't require those four year degrees. Right. There's a new book that was put out a few months ago by Noam Scheiber at the New York Times and it was about the organizing efforts at Starbucks and at Amazon and some of these places. And what Noam is writing about is that a lot of this is kicked off by people who got four year degrees at pretty fancy places and then found themselves working at an Amazon warehouse or at Starbucks or at a place where those are good jobs. But it's just a place. It is not what you expect that you will be doing when you graduate, when you go into a four year degree. And so some of the discontent over the conditions and some of the idea like can we organize and get better conditions for us? Is pushed in part by young people who might have expected a better workplace for themselves. And so the macro stuff around higher education I think is the thing that's pushing a lot of this stuff. And what I ended up concluding, even though the conceit of the set of columns was like, is AI going to make it so my daughter isn't going to college? What I ended up finding is that all these macro factors are much more important in terms of finding that answer.
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C
Let's bring up the elephant in the room. AI. I'm fascinated by what you just said. We should not overstress that. AI is the big difference maker here. You're saying there are a lot of other forces at work that might have been at work before AI even came into the picture that are causing these sort of trends.
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B
Yeah. The biggest force out there is something that economists are calling the demographic cliff, right? And it is that starting in 2008 with the financial crash, that the birth rate in America plummeted and it hasn't recovered, which means that there are much less 18 year olds that are in the pipeline that would go to college than that there were before. Now it's 2026, and it means that those kids who weren't born in 2008 would be going to college this year. Right? And so people have been thinking about this because obviously it's not like it was, you know, the signal was raised a few years ago or even 10 years ago that maybe this would be a problem. But universities really haven't adjusted to the new reality because as I said before, they've had 50 years of growth. It's hard when you're just in a growth industry to then just say, well, maybe things will change. That's the number one macro factor. All the economic stuff obviously is very, very important. And what AI has done more than anything, I think that it's been said by a lot of people that AI more than anything is a mirror, right? Like when we interact with the AI and when we think about the AI, it more reveals stuff about ourselves. And so what it's done is that it has been a very unflattering mirror for higher education because it's exposed a lot of the problems that were there beforehand, right? Like now if you look at, like
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what, what comes to mind, like if
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you look at the cheating thing, right? That's the biggest thing that people think about when they think AI in college. It's like, well, why are all these kids cheating? Why is it so rampant? I ended up talking about 20 something professors about AI in their classrooms, and every single one of them, with a couple exceptions, even the ones that were bullish about what AI could produce were like, it really sucks to have these kids cheat all the time. And you had professors just pleading with students, right? Like, I don't care what your grade is. Like, you have grade inflation, your grade's gonna be okay, right?
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Just, I want you to learn. I want you to learn, right?
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Read this book and tell me what it did for you emotionally, right? Like, I want you to Think about this. It's like one of the big questions in human existence. And just think about it. And a lot of students just wouldn't do it. And what does that reveal? Well, it just reveals that maybe the relationship that these students have to their college education is somehow broken. It's not about going there for learning about the world. It's not about. Like, when I was in college, I took a religion class. I read the Bhagavad Gita, and it was very. I was a bad student. And I. I didn't go to that class very much. But the times that I went and I read that book, it was very transformative for me to think about the Bhagavad Gita. But that's because I went into the classroom thinking, well, I don't know, if I pay attention, maybe I'll learn stuff that'll change my brain and I'll be a different human being afterwards. And I think that what the cheating thing at least exposes is that for a lot of kids, it's much more mercenary. It's just, I'm here to get this degree and that the cheating scandal more than anything, just sort of shows. Well, if you can't get these kids to stop for their own good, then, like, what does that say about the reason why the kids are there, you know? And what does it say about the message? What, for your own good? It means.
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C
Yeah, the fact that they're using AI this tool says something more about them than the tool itself.
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B
Right, right.
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C
Which is so interesting. And, I mean, you talked about the professors are kind of desperately seeking ways to hold on to this nostalgia. I hate to even use that word. But they're returning to blue books and oral exams. Like, did you come away thinking that teaching can successfully adapt or no?
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B
Oh, man. I mean, that's a tough question. The level of despair that I found amongst the professors was quite profound. And, you know, one of the professors wrote me, he's a drama teacher at Grambling State University, which HBCU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And, you know, like, he was talking about how it was so hard to get the kids, his students, to read August Wilson's Fences. And he gave them all these options, right? You can watch the movie that came out. You can read the play. Just any way that you can intake this thing, please do it, and we can talk about it, you know, and he just got AI summaries of the play. These are kids in a theater class, right? It's not like, you know, it's not like a boring class. It's like a class where you would hope that the students would participate. Now that doesn't mean that all of them are doing it right, but it is students. I talk to professors at flagship state universities, at Ivy League schools, community colleges, regional public universities, everywhere, and it was completely consistent that a large, large number of students are basically farming their educations out to the chatbots. And I think that wresting that away basically cannot happen until you ask the most fundamental question. And I don't know if the colleges are ready to ask this question, which is like, why are we here? What are we doing? Like, why do we exist right outside of a credentialing system that people do because they've done it in the past or because their parents did it, or because employers want it. Right. Like why are we here? And when they can't answer that question except, well, you're going to go to some classes and then you'll get a better job, then that students are just going to, I think basically default and say, well, I can just kind of not do this thing right. The classwork, I don't value it that much because I feel like I'm here to get this degree because that's what I've been told. That's why I did all this competition in high school to get to this place. And I just don't want to do it. It's almost like Bartleby, they're like, well, I prefer not to. And I think that that's a really tough situation for a lot of professors to be in. But again, I think that for the students and also the faculty and the administration, that fundamental question of why are we all here? Hasn't really been answered in a satisfying way.
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C
I want to talk about some of the take homes that you have from kind of studying this. I mean one, I think about you saying how AI is a mirror on kind of younger people today. Like part of it is getting younger people to not view college. And this experience is so mercenary and transactional. Right. It's to encourage them to want something bigger, whether it's a four year degree or whether it's something else. But like, if you're gonna pay for this, if you're gonna put a lot of money in, it's conversations between PAR and their kids to make sure that there's an understanding of the value and you're not just going there to cheat and get a degree.
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Yeah, I just think that's very hard when college has become so competitive and cutthroat. Like, how do you convince A person who starts resume building in the seventh or eighth grade. Right. Like here in Cupertino, California, or down in Silicon Valley, you just have these intense, intense competition among students to just get into these colleges. Can you get into UC Berkeley? Can you get into Harvard? Can you get into Stanford?
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We're encouraging the transactional competitiveness.
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Right? Your life is over. Right. Like, if you end up at, like, Davis, then, like, you're just never going to be able to access the elite. You're not going to work at a VC or whatever in the way that you would if you went to Stanford. Right. It's just fundamentally true that people who go to these Ivy League schools have much better access to these prestige institutions than if they don't. Right. And the kids are very aware of all of this stuff. And I think that when you basically set this thing up as a credentialing system to get into the elites, then how do you convince the kids that they should go and they should read the books and that they should think about the Krishna and Arjuna at the battlefield at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita? And that's the point of college, right? Or that they should go to an art history class and they should look at Buddhas and they should think about, like, you know, how all life is suffering. These are all things that were important to me in college.
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Right? Yeah.
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Like they're gonna go and they're gonna say, well, I want the best thing out of this. I heard about all these people who didn't get the job that they wanted coming out of college, and now they're working at a Starbucks, right? And I don't want that for. So I'm just going to be as transactional about this as possible. And so when the value of the degree is dropping, when the number of people who are attending these schools is dropping, when employers are starting to sort of calcify their elite credential funneling systems or their pathways into them. I think that is really hard for everybody to think about it in any way except cynically, because the system is cynical. And so, I don't know, selling them, like, hey, there's a lot of people who have a lot of ideas about what college should look like now. And one of them, which I'm very partial to, is like, well, what if we just had an AI free school and we just read Ovid and we read Katalis and we read, I don't know, Herodotus, and the kids read the Quran and they read like, Foucault or Whatever. Right.
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In a totally tech free zone. No cheating, no AI. Yeah.
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And the kids will learn the Socratic method and they'll sit there and they'll be like, well, what is Western civilization? And they're like, what is Eastern civilization?
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Yeah. Somebody tells me that's not the answer.
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But I. Yeah, but the idea that that would be at scale, the idea that that could be something that lots of people did, I don't know, I think that's really difficult to sell. I mean, I'm a lit nerd. I live in Berkeley, California, I work for the New Yorker. And so if there's anybody who would be okay with their kids going to that type of college, it would be me. But even I would be like, well, I don't know, I think we got to get a little something else out of this college education. We need some guarantee. And so yeah, I don't know, I just think it's very hard to break the cycle of this cynicism just because I think the cynicism is there because it's accurate.
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C
Did you, I mean, you gave us a number of reflections in the last piece in your New Yorker series. Any of them more positive and less cynical about higher ed?
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B
Yes, I think that as knowledge or the idea of acquiring knowledge becomes flattened a little bit and I think as a lot of these four year institutions start feeling a lot of pain from the enrollment cliff, I think what will happen is that one of the big winners out of all of this will be community colleges. And the reason why I think that is because I think that a people will be very aware of the high price of four year institutions. And as some of these places start to close because of the enrollment cliff, I think that a lot of the students will be funneled into community colleges. I think that community colleges also are much more flexible and they're much more used to dealing with economic disaster because they're always at a point where things are tight. And so I think they'll be more flexible more than four year institutions who might just say, like, we have all these donors, we have all this tradition and what ends up happening is that they close within 10 years. Right. And so I think that that's very positive. I think that having a expanded base of students who go to community colleges, some of whom transfer into four year institutions, some of is actually a better model for higher education than what we have right now, which is a lot of expensive four year institutions. The schools that are on the biggest chopping block. I don't mean to offend anybody, but as you can imagine, as enrollments go down and things get tight, are these four year institutions, private institutions that don't necessarily have a very high academic reputation? I think those types of schools closing is not the worst thing in the world. I don't think a hundred thousand or eighty thousand, seventy thousand year private institution that doesn't really bring that much to the table. I don't think that that's the worst thing for that type of place to close. And if those types of students who go to those schools end up at four year regional public institutions that are much cheaper, if they end up at community colleges and transfer into four year institutions, I think that's probably better for society than just having this massive, expensive higher education university.
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C
So given all of that, you can probably predict my coming full circle question. Are you, your daughter 2035 is when she'd be going to school? How do you feel about that college fund? Are you going to keep contributing to it?
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Yeah, I'm going to keep contributing to it because I think that I would feel worse if she wants to go to a four year institution. I don't have the money saved up, so it's mostly a defensive measure. But I will say this, that I think compared to my own childhood where it was not on the table for me to not go to college, even though I feel like, I mean, I don't know yet. But I would say if I'm going to predict things, I was much more rebellious than I think she is and I was much more of a live option to not go to college than she was, just because I had a rough time in high school and I also was quite rebellious and I was not interested in going to college at all. I would say that if she came to me and said I don't want to go to school, I'd be much more open to it than my parents were for me. And I think that that's not any specific thing. I just think that if you take the generational averages of sentiments about parents being okay with their kids not going to college, I think in 2035 there will be much, much more parents whose kids could go to four year institutions who decide not to, who will be okay with that than there were in 1998.
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C
I mean, maybe this, as you said, is a moment for everyone, all of us, parents, you know, students who are thinking about it and the colleges themselves, to just be asking the question like what is the value? What is the purpose of this and is it necessary?
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B
Right. And if we can't answer that question, Then should we keep badgering people and bludgeoning people with this cultural message that if you don't go, you're screwed?
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You know, don't stigmatize, not going, like it's okay.
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B
Yeah. Is that a responsible way for us to think about things? We know it's not true. There are colleges all around the country right now that are under intense financial pressure that are probably going to close. And I think that because of that, that there is a intense defensiveness in higher education that I understand. I don't think that that defensiveness can just be everybody still needs to go to college when it is very obvious that not everybody still needs to go to college. And I think that the more the universities protest, you know, we're at a time of intense, like, anti higher education, anti institutional thinking in this country. The more they protest, the less effective that message will be. And I think it'll fall on more and more deaf ears as it goes forward.
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C
Jay, thanks for writing this and thanks for this curiosity journey for all of us. And I really appreciate you talking to us.
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Thank you.
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We'll include a link to Jay Caspian King 8 predictions for the future of higher education on our show notes page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, the little headphones at the bottom to find it.