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More Americans are wising up to the fact that higher education has become a raw deal for all too many young people.

A new NBC News poll finds that a full 63% of voters believe a four-year college degree now isn’t worth it, since many students graduate with “a large amount of debt” but no “specific job skills.”

That’s up markedly from 2013, when a majority took the opposite view, as 53% called a degree “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime.”

That was the case for generations of Americans, who saw college as a key step to higher-paying jobs and a better life: “Upwardly mobile” was almost entirely synonymous with “college educated.”

But over the last few decades, the dynamic has shifted: Far too many college degrees guarantee nothing . . . except onerous debt.

Tuition costs have skyrocketed, doubling over the last 20 years (a redoubling from two decades earlier), as universities jacked up prices to match increased “help” such as federal aid and ever-larger government-facilitated student loans.

But in return for 70 grand or more a year, students today too often don’t get prepared for a lucrative or even stable career.

Countless colleges have transformed into woke indoctrination factories that churn out grads with liberal arts degrees and zero specialized skills.

A report last year found that two-thirds of colleges require DEI-related courses to graduate, offering classes like “Understanding Diversity in a Pluralistic Society” and “Abolition of Whiteness.”

Why take on huge debt to be pummeled nonstop with identity politics?

Meanwhile, grade inflation and faculties increasingly dominated by leftist ideologues reduce the return even on “real” classes.

Plus, a rapidly changing economy is making white-collar jobs an increasingly unsafe bet.

Prospective students once could safely bet that a hard science or math degree was a sure winner, but the rise of AI is already wiping out options for recent grads in countless sectors, including tech.

Americans have noticed: College enrollment has plummeted these last few years, while numbers of Gen Zers are eyeing high-paying, high-demand careers as welders, plumbers and electricians.

Trade school was once stigmatized as a less-appealing option than the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, but a less expensive, more focused education that teaches a highly valuable skill now often seems the far wiser choice.

Yes, college can still absolutely make sense for many young people, especially at the schools that have kept tuition affordable and academic standards rigorous — but the idea that everyone should go never made much sense, and is plainly false today.

Higher Ed, Inc. is on notice: Squeezing students with sky-high tuitions while offering subpar, ideology-driven curriculum is a death sentence.

America’s students have caught on to the scam.

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Kids in elementary school learn—or are supposed to learn—how to add fractions and round numbers. But many students at the University of California, San Diego—a top public university ranked sixth nationally by U.S. News & World Report—can’t do either, according to a new analysis from the university. Read, and weep for the future of America.

Roughly one in eight freshmen lack rudimentary high-school math skills, defined as geometry, algebra and algebra 2. It gets worse: Students who had been placed in a remedial high-school math class in 2023 had roughly fifth-grade-level abilities. Only 39% could correctly round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred—a third-grade skill.

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Because so many incoming students were numerically illiterate, the university added a remedial class for middle- and elementary-school math. Remarkably, among students placed into that math course, 94% had completed an advanced math class in high school (e.g., pre-calculus, calculus or statistics) and received an average A- in their math courses.

Is this an indictment of A) the University of California’s admissions; B) public K-12 schools; C) U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings; or D) all of the above? If you chose D, you’re correct.

Start with A. The UC Board of Regents in 2020 scrapped standardized tests as an admissions requirement under the guise of promoting “equity.” The likely real reason: Blacks and Hispanics score lower on average on the SAT. Requiring applicants to submit standardized tests scores could also make it easier for critics to prove the university is providing racial preferences, which were prohibited by a 1996 voter referendum. The math-proficiency analysis suggests it may be doing so on the sly.

Amid a push to boost diversity and overall enrollment—and thus rake in more government student aid—UC San Diego admitted increasing numbers of unqualified applicants from low-income high schools: “In order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding,” the report says.

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This has done a grave disservice to ill-prepared students, who take longer to complete degrees (and thus accrue more debt) and drop out of more rigorous majors. Few if any students who take remedial math successfully complete an engineering degree, the report notes.

The university’s admissions place a heavy emphasis on GPAs, but these don’t reliably reflect student preparation because grades are inflated. Some students may also cheat their way to high grades. Smartphones and AI have made it easier to do so. At the same time, scores on AP tests have become a less dependable marker of merit.

That’s because the College Board has made the exams easier to pass to encourage more students to take them—and thus rake in more money from testing fees. The share of students passing AP exams has soared over the last two decades, including for calculus AB (6.3 percentage points), English language and composition (17.9), chemistry (21.9) and U.S. history (23.3).

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Call it vanity grading: Mediocre students now graduate with top GPAs and AP scores, which makes parents feel better about their kids’ public schools and eases political pressures for education reform.

On to answer B: The report says students have “been underserved by their prior schooling.” No kidding. Only 22% of 12th graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) last year, the lowest on record.

One UC San Diego remedial math tutor observed that “some teachers would teach ‘life skills’ in high school math class, just using calculators, the internet, and prescribed formulas; classes didn’t teach ‘mathematical thinking.’” One problem is union contracts protect lousy and lazy teachers from being fired—and prevent talented, hardworking ones from being rewarded with higher pay.

Meanwhile, some of the profession’s best teachers, highly capable women who entered the profession when their sex had fewer career options, have been retiring. Many of their replacements are lacking. Teacher credential programs typically require only a C+ average in undergrad. With the pervasive grade inflation in colleges, many young teachers may themselves have only fifth-grade math skills.

Answer C: Many parents mistakenly consider the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings a proxy of a college’s prestige. But the rankings don’t reflect the caliber of students a college admits, nor graduate outcomes that matter. The rankings don’t factor in student standardized test scores for colleges like the UCs that don’t require them.

Graduation and retention rates make up by far the biggest weight in the rankings, but that may encourage colleges to inflate grades to ensure that unqualified applicants that they admit still graduate. Graduate employment outcomes account for only 5% of the rankings’ weight.

To its credit, the UC San Diego report recommends reinstating a standardized testing admission requirement. This might help, but that Titanic may have sailed. After many colleges made standardized tests optional, the College Board last year dumbed down the SAT in an effort to encourage more students to take it.

The test now takes two hours, instead of three, and students get more time to complete each question. Gone, too, are long reading passages that might strain TikTok attention spans. Analogies were eliminated in 2005 after academics claimed they were culturally biased.

The sum of all this is a tragedy of the education commons. Institutions, acting in their own interest, are debasing America’s pool of young, human capital. Heaven help us.

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