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Gen Z is losing faith in the promise of a college education — and with good reason.
A plurality of college programs don’t provide a return on investment. Colleges are now charging as much as $100,000 a year in tuition and fees. Record numbers of young people are drowning in student loan debt. And fewer Americans than ever believe that a college education is very important.
It’s a healthy and very much overdue check on a system that has convinced young people for decades that success lies on the other side of four years and a six-figure investment.
“The older generations strongly advocate the college route, because, for them, it used to be way more affordable,” Alejandro Rodriguez told The Post. “They used to be able to go to college for like 15 grand, which is basically the cost of a semester now.”
The 20-year-old from Houston, Texas, was a high-achieving AP student when he graduated from high school two years ago.
But Rodriguez chose to forgo a traditional degree and instead attended Universal Technical Institute. He now works as a Porsche technician apprentice, where he hopes to rise up the ranks.
He’s right about the cost of college. The price of a public four year degree has doubled adjusting for inflation since just 1995, and Americans today are buried in a staggering $1.7 trillion in federal student loan debt. Rodriguez is part of a growing number of young adults pursuing alternative paths; enrollment in certificate programs grew at 10 times the rate of traditional 4-year degrees between 2025 and 2026.
And it’s no wonder, considering how graduates are faring. 31% of American college students attend programs that have a negative return on investment. Two thirds of Gen Z borrowers say that their debt has delayed a major milestone in their life, and a staggering 82% worry about repayment.
It’s not just the cost of education that’s putting off students; even finding a job after graduation is an uphill battle.
Take the case of Jack Weis, a Princeton physics PhD who recently told the Wall Street Journal he had applied to 2,300 jobs to no avail.
Now the 30-year-old is unemployed and living with his parents, despite the Ivy League diploma.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the historical advantage conferred to recent college graduates looking for employment has been slowly disappearing for years.
Young workers without degrees are experiencing near-record low levels of unemployment, while their college educated peers are having some of the worst employment outcomes over the past two decades.
Researchers have also found that 45% of college graduates hold jobs that don’t require their degree 10 years down the road. Nearly half of recent grads are “underemployed,” per the New York Fed, meaning that they’re over-credentialed for the job they actually have.
Jasmine Gopie, a 22-year-old dental assistant, skipped the four-year degree in favor of an eight-month dental assisting program at Concorde. The dental office where she did her externship wound up hiring her full time. Now most of her friends are graduating college — and some of them are calling her for advice on how to actually find a job.
“I felt like it was more important for me to start networking and getting my foot inside of the door inside of this field, rather than spend four years and a lot of money on a degree,” she said. “The way that high school is set up is, ‘Hey, look, you’re gonna go to college, you’re gonna go do your four years, and then you’re gonna do what you want with that degree.’ And honestly, I feel like other routes should be explained to these students.”
It’s true that, over the past couple generations, college went from a privilege to a default in our culture, and it became much more expensive in the process. Kids were promised that a degree is the key to success — but, when everyone has a degree, nobody really has an advantage.
The erosion in public trust has been catastrophic for higher education. An October 2026 Gallup poll found that a record-low 31% of Americans think that a college education is “very important” — a staggering tumble from 75% in just 2010.
Young people are starting to wake up — and they’re proving the educational essentialists wrong.