Many Young People Think a High School Diploma Is Enough, Poll Finds

Education Week reports:

Two new polls show that Americans—particularly young Americans—don’t see a college degree as crucial to their career success, yet one more sign that people are questioning whether higher education is worth the debt that typically comes with it.

One poll found that nearly half of young people ages 13 to 29 think a high school diploma alone is sufficient to thrive in the workplace.

“That’s a striking number of young people who think a high school diploma is enough. [That belief] is just incorrect, and it really worries me,” said Harry J. Holzer, a Georgetown University economist and public policy professor who studies the kinds of education various jobs require.

Believing a high school diploma alone leads to good jobs flies in the face of research showing that increasingly, jobs in the modern economy demand some kind of training or education after high school. Young people can aspire to a vast sector of “middle skill” jobs that pay well and don’t require four-year degrees, but in general, bachelor’s degrees still produce much higher lifetime earnings.

Soul searching about higher education is widespread, though, fueled by concern about its price tag and questions about its necessity in a rapidly evolving job market that is challenging the relevance of a traditional college education. Those doubts came through clearly in the two sets of poll results.

A Harris poll released Thursday asked 2,015 adults what kinds of training or education they consider “absolutely essential,” and of five options, a college degree came in third. “Soft skills” topped the list, with 37 percent, followed by job preparation, with 36 percent.

Only 23 percent said a college degree is “absolutely essential.” Adding the responses of those who think college degrees are “very important” brought the total to 54 percent.

Having earned a degree didn’t change people’s views. Only 28 percent of the respondents who were college graduates said they consider a college degree “absolutely essential.” The poll didn’t make a distinction between two- and four-year degrees.

Attitudes toward a college degree varied by age group. Sixty percent of respondents 65 or older said a bachelor’s degree was essential or very important, compared with 52 percent of those 18 to 34.

Adrienne Diercks, the founder of Project Success, a group that works with Minneapolis schools to help students “connect to their purpose” through enrichment activities and goal-setting, and that commissioned the Harris poll, said the results argue for carefully tailoring post-high school planning to each student’s aspirations instead of urging them all to attend four-year colleges.

An article well worth your time.