College Still Pays Off as Confidence in Higher Education Collapses

The University of Pennsylvania, ranked fifth overall in Forbes’ annual ranking of the top 500 U.S. colleges, reports the highest median 10-year graduate salary on the list: $151,328. Graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Princeton University, and Harvard University also secure median salaries surpassing $120,000 ten years after graduation.

Those outcomes contrast with the median annual earnings of $41,800 for full-time workers aged 25 to 34 whose highest credential is a high school diploma, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The datasets cover different demographics and timelines, but they underscore a persistent “college premium.”

The financial return remains visible even at institutions facing severe strain. Marietta College, a private liberal arts institution founded in 1835 in rural Ohio, ranks No. 500 in the Forbes ranking and produces a median 10-year post-graduation salary of $105,837. To address multimillion-dollar budget shortfalls, the college has eliminated several academic programs and implemented faculty layoffs in recent years.

Forbes heavily weights return on investment (ROI), using federal metrics such as student debt and salary outcomes from the College Scorecard. Nearly every school on the list produces median post-graduation earnings exceeding $90,000 within a decade.

At the same time, the average annual cost of college—including tuition, books, fees, and daily living expenses—has more than doubled over the past two decades, reaching $39,406 per student, according to data from the Education Data Initiative. The average undergraduate borrower now takes on more than $35,000 in student loan debt to complete a bachelor’s degree, while national student loan debt has grown to over $1.6 trillion and affects more than 43 million Americans.

Public confidence has moved in the opposite direction. A Gallup poll found that 75% of Americans considered a college education “very important” in 2010; that share has since fallen to a record low of 35%. The decline has unfolded as delayed career starts and soaring costs have intensified doubts about higher education.

The labor market has added to that anxiety. College graduates historically experienced lower unemployment than the broader workforce, but in 2015 the unemployment rate for recent college graduates exceeded that of all workers for the first time. The gap remains: unemployment among recent graduates is currently 5.7%, compared with 4.1% for the overall labor market.

Within colleges themselves, the pressure is becoming harder to absorb. A forecast by the Huron Consulting Group estimates that approximately 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are at risk of closure or forced mergers over the next decade.

The projected “demographic cliff” is one source of that vulnerability. Beginning around 2025, the number of college-age Americans is expected to decline sharply because of falling birth rates during the 2007–2009 Great Recession. Federal administrative delays in processing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) have added another disruption, affecting enrollment cycles for hundreds of campuses.

Skills-based hiring has expanded as skepticism spreads through the public and private sectors. State governments began removing bachelor’s degree requirements for thousands of state civil service positions to widen their talent pools, starting with Maryland in 2022 under then-Gov. Larry Hogan and followed by Utah, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and New York.

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., holds degrees from Tufts University and Harvard Business School. In 2024, he said that graduating from an Ivy League institution or earning top grades is not a guaranteed predictor of workforce success.

“I don’t think necessarily because you go to an Ivy League school or have great grades it means you’re going to be a great worker or great person,” Dimon said. He emphasized that practical skills are “far more important” than degrees for many corporate roles. “If you look at skills of people, it is amazing how skilled people are in something, but it didn’t show up in their resume.”

Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard University to build what is now Meta Platforms Inc., made a similar point during an interview on the Theo Von podcast. He said college remains useful for social networking but questioned its alignment with contemporary job market requirements.

“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are…really big,” Zuckerberg said. He added, “There’s going to have to be a reckoning…and people are going to have to figure out whether that makes sense. It’s sort of been this taboo thing to say, ‘Maybe not everyone needs to go to college,’ and because there’s a lot of jobs that don’t require that…people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago.”

Salesforce Inc. CEO Marc Benioff, an alumnus of the University of Southern California, challenged the idea that a degree is essential for professional achievement in a 2021 interview with NBC.

“Everybody thinks that if you don’t have a college degree, you can’t be successful in the United States, and it’s not true,” Benioff told NBC in 2021. “You can create incredible value for the world without a college degree.”