Tania Tetlow told Tom Llamas in this Top Story episode that a college degree doubles a person’s earnings over the course of a lifetime, but acknowledged that economic anxiety and loss of trust in institutions is causing people to question the value of higher education.
“When you look at the economic data, actually it’s still true that having a college degree doubles your earnings over the course of a lifetime. So we really want people to make their choices having the real information about what that investment can do for you.”
“The American people have lost trust in almost every kind of institution, and in a time of growing economic pressure and rising prices, that anxiety is real. We also have a model, a pricing, where the posted price of tuition is actually a lot higher than what people pay. We flood financial aid on families to make sure that we can do as much as possible to be affordable. But tuition is daunting, and we know that.”
“There are so many critical jobs that don’t require college, and so many that do, and when people are thinking about their ambitions and their hopes and dreams to prepare them from every imaginable profession, which includes, as I talk to employers, those kinds of soft skills that are hard to teach on the job, like critical thinking, curiosity, openness, the emotional intelligence to navigate teamwork. You can learn that a lot of ways, but one of the best ways to do it is on a college campus.
“There’s so much richness in teaching the kind of critical thinking skills that help you navigate the easy answer the internet spits out at you, and particularly in this fog of information of this chaotic world we live in, of learning those skills of deep thinking, of putting yourself in the shoes of others … and particularly in a moment when AI is going to take over a lot of the technical sort of sculpt work of life, those deeper, richer skills are what will remain. And the research shows education correlates to your willingness to vote, to be a good citizen, to really engage with the world and get that from other ways but it’s so much harder to do it on your own.”
Watch the entire interview here.
