Somewhere between the sticker shock of tuition and the fifth news cycle declaring a degree scam, a certain Gen Z take has become gospel: college is overpriced, overhyped, and a bad bet. You’ve heard the highlights. A plumber out-earns a lawyer. A friend’s cousin dropped out and is now “in tech.” A recent grad is back in their childhood bedroom with a degree and a LinkedIn full of “congrats on the new role” from people who’ve never hired anyone. And in fairness, the data gives the pessimist some ammunition: a survey reported by NewsNation found that 51% of Gen Z consider their degree a waste of money, compared with 20% of baby boomers. I’m not here to tell you the skepticism is wrong. A degree used to work like a golden ticket, and it doesn’t anymore. But while Gen Z has been loudly questioning college, something sneakier has been happening: we keep showing up. The share of 18 to 24 year olds who are enrolled in or have finished college has stayed just under 50% for more than a decade, which is the same stretch in which our generation has started turning 18. We’ve collectively left college a one-star review and then re-enrolled for the spring semester, like a gym membership we complain about on the way in. We’re not leaving. We’ve just stopped buying the sales pitch. And a generation that doubts the promise but still shows up to class isn’t rejecting education — it’s negotiating with it.
Let’s give the doubters their dues first, because they’re not imagining things. Career coach Kolby Goodman told Fortune that older generations entered a job market where a degree was practically a guarantee of employment, and Gen Z inherited the price tag without the guarantee. As Kevin Thompson, the CEO of 9i Capital Group, put it to Newsweek, “college isn’t magic, it’s just expensive.” That’s a fair complaint. College used to function less like a choice and more like a coupon: present at graduation, receive a job. The coupon expired, and nobody told the people still paying full price for it.
I know this from the inside. I’m 19, about to turn 20, a member of the high school class of 2024, and on track to graduate in the spring of 2027. I’ve done the things you’re supposed to do. And the plan for what comes after is to walk across a stage in a cap and gown and then walk straight back into the bedroom I share with my sister. Nobody puts that part in the graduation brochure. For a while, I wondered whether I was just being unrealistic, whether expecting anything different was the problem. I’ve landed somewhere else: I don’t think we’re being realistic so much as waking up. The pipeline we were sold had three steps — degree, job, apartment — but only the first one is actually in our hands. We’ve held up our end for four years, and we’re being told to be flexible about the results.
But going home isn’t proof the degree failed, and that is where the doubt starts to get it wrong. It treats “no longer a guarantee” as if it means “no longer worth it,” and those are not in the same sentence. A Realtor.com analysis of Census data found that a record 25.2 million Americans under 35 lived with their parents last year, roughly a third of that age group, which says less about any one diploma than about what housing costs. And the degree still seems to help: in an analysis of Census data by the National Association of Home Builders, the share of young adults living with their parents falls from about a quarter of those with no education past high school to 16% of those with a bachelor’s degree. There’s more than 40 million Americans who have some college credit but no degree, a growing share of whom are heading back to finish. That should make us pause before we call it a scam.
The doubt also gets the picture wrong. When we imagine “the college student,” we still picture the carefree sophomore hauling a mini fridge into a dorm. The same opinion piece argues it’s time to retire that image in favor of the one actually walking onto campuses: parents, full-time workers, and adults returning after years away. The suitemate you’ve never seen for more than thirty seconds between their classes and the part-time job that’s never really part-time. Most of the people paying for it aren’t on a four-year vacation. They have a work schedule and a calendar alert for the payment plan.
And the doubt misses the target. We aren’t mad at college. It’s the bill, and the promise attached to it. We’ve been yelling at the kitchen when our problem is with the check. Those are separate problems with separate fixes, and treating them as one is how you end up with a generation arguing about whether education matters instead of asking why it costs what it does. Skepticism is a useful instinct. It’s just a bad conclusion.
So here’s my take: Questioning college is healthy. Using doubt as an excuse to stop asking better questions is not. What does this degree actually cost? What does it realistically get me? What am I doing with these four years besides paying for them? Those aren’t anti-college questions. They’re the exact questions college was supposed to teach us to ask. For what it costs, it’s the least it can do.