There's a war on the bachelor's degree. Can anything replace it?

By Jillian Berman

The share of Americans with a bachelor's degree has been going up for years. That's about to change, if politicians get their way.

Policy makers and the public are questioning the role of the bachelor's degree in American life, but a clear alternative hasn't emerged.

Ever since the government began tracking the share of the American population with a bachelor's degree, that figure has grown. At last count, about 2 million people across the country were receiving one each year.

But a loose-knit movement has emerged that wants to dramatically reduce the number of these degrees issued by U.S. colleges and universities.

Republican politicians and conservative firebrands have made that goal explicit. Christopher Rufo, whose ideas have been a driving force behind the Trump administration's assault on higher education, told the Wall Street Journal that he wants to see the number of Americans enrolling in four-year colleges cut in half. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has said Americans should be rethinking the role of a four-year degree in American life - perhaps reserving it to train people for a small number of professions.

The message is also coming from elsewhere. Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, which is strongly aligned with Democrats, urged New York Times readers to "stop trying to make everyone go to college." During her presidential campaign, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris said that if elected, she would get rid of any unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs.

And it's not just rhetoric. Congress recently opened up more government funding for students who want to pursue very short-term programs. In its settlement with the White House, Brown University agreed to pay $50 million to workforce-development organizations. President Donald Trump has said he'd like an agreement with Harvard University to include funding for trade schools. In a document laying out their workforce strategy, Trump administration officials said "the 'college for all approach' has failed" and pledged to use the might of the government and its funds to bolster alternatives. A growing number of colleges and universities are looking to appeal to those who doubt the value of a traditional bachelor's degree by offering three-year programs. In a perhaps more subtle attack on college-going, changes coming from the Republican megabill passed this summer will, for many people, make student loans harder to repay.

The war on the bachelor's degree is the culmination of a broad skepticism of higher education that has been building for years. Factors like rising student debt and high-profile examples of people becoming successful without a degree have helped fuel questions about the value that colleges and universities deliver. Peter Thiel, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has been paying high-achieving kids to skip college through his fellowship program since 2011.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is one of many voices questioning the role of four-year degrees in American life.

There's reason to be concerned. About half of students who earn a bachelor's degree from a public or private nonprofit four-year college use debt to finance it, borrowing roughly $30,000 on average, according to the College Board. That's manageable if you have a job, but the unemployment rate for young college graduates is the highest it's been in more than a decade, outside of the pandemic, and colleges broadly don't appear equipped to prepare students for a labor market powered by artificial intelligence.

Still, the proponents of tearing down the bachelor degree from its prominent role in American life offer few viable substitutes that can be applied broadly today, experts say. The absence of widely available good alternatives to achieving financial stability means a bachelor's degree remains the best shot at a decent financial life for many Americans.

In the next seven years, the U.S. will need 4.5 million more workers with at least a bachelor's degree, according to Georgetown University's Center for Education and the Workforce. Right now, more than 500,000 students from the top half of their high school class don't go on to complete a college credential every year, the center found.

"All else being equal, getting a bachelor's degree is still going to be the best return on investment for most students," said Rajeev Darolia, an economist at the University of Kentucky who is studying the returns for alternatives to the bachelor's degree like shorter-term programs. "It also leads to potentially more flexible and lucrative career paths."

He added: "What worries me is that we could be diverting students away from investments, longer-term degrees that are likely to have higher returns," noting that he's particularly concerned about poorer students being pushed toward the cheaper option.

Americans realize college isn't delivering on its promise the way it used to

A college education in the U.S. was once largely reserved for the elite, much like in England and elsewhere in Europe. But through policies like the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which established public colleges geared toward agriculture and other practical topics, lawmakers increased access to college for some.

The G.I. Bill, which provided a college education for veterans returning home from World War II, helped expand the middle class and transformed colleges and universities into the entities educating millions of students that we know today.

In the decades since, the way policy makers and educators have dealt with concerns that students may be diverted from college - the path with the best average financial outcome - has been a strategy called "college for all." In this approach, the K-12 education system is designed to push everyone toward four-year college, with the goal of getting as many students there as possible. It has been fueled by a belief in the power of college to change individuals' economic circumstances and drive the nation's ability to compete. Now, the consensus that college is an individual and a societal good is shifting, putting the trend of growing college attainment at risk in the coming years.

Encouraging every high school student to go to college made sense because for decades, a bachelor's degree "was a sure bet," said Jeff Strohl, the director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. "It was pretty darn easy to get a B.A., costs hadn't started to go up, the market was hungry for skilled labor."

But around the year 2000, the youth labor market began to collapse and the college-wage premium - the difference in earnings between the average college graduate and the average high school graduate - started to flatten. In 2023, the college-wage premium was slightly lower than it was in 2000.

"It began to tell us that something was going on," Strohl said.

But in the years since, evidence has been mounting that the college-wage premium may not be a reliable metric for students and families to use to make decisions about their post-high-school plans, because the divergence in value between degrees in different subjects has become so wide.

"You just can't assume as you once could that just a B.A. was enough. It's what type of B.A. that you have that is driving value," Strohl said. "That's very important to consider. About 25% of B.A.s don't have a positive return on investment."

Where the students attend also matters - and more than it used to. The most highly ranked 300 colleges suck up a lot of the government funding and political and media attention focused on higher education, but they educate a relatively small share of the nation's college students, said Catharine Bond Hill, who is the managing director at Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit research and consulting organization.

"They're really expensive. They spend a lot per student," said Hill, who served as president of Vassar College, which is one of those 300 schools, from 2006 to 2016. "They do that because they're competing with each other in an environment for talented students that can pay full tuition and want the services. It means we have a segment of really great schools, but they're pretty small. They can't educate that many."

The gap in outcomes between schools wasn't always so stark. Since the origins of the higher-education system until about the 1960s, "what it meant for a rich kid and a poor kid to go to college was pretty similar," said Zach Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University who studies higher education.

"While it was true that among college graduates, people from higher-income families were more successful in the labor market, college was meaningfully closing that gap," he said. "Since the 1960s that has been less and less the case. The value of going to college has really declined for lower-income kids."

A major driver of this trend, according to Bleemer's recent research, is that the largest, most research-oriented public colleges, which tend to disproportionately enroll higher-income students, have sucked in more and more of their states' funding.

"States have increasingly chosen to put their money toward these big flagship schools" at the expense of the regional public colleges where low-income students are more likely to attend, Bleemer said. "Low-income kids are going to the same schools they've always gone to," he said, but they're more expensive and the quality has declined, "because they're investing less in the students that enroll there."

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