Everyone Is Saying College Isn't Worth It.

Hey there!

There is a narrative running through every corner of the internet right now. College is a scam. The ROI isn't there. Skip it, learn to code, start a business, get a trade. The people saying this are often successful, often credible, and often completely wrong about what the data actually shows.

I want to push back on this. Not because college is perfect or because everyone should go. But because the way this argument gets made online is almost entirely disconnected from what the numbers say. And the numbers matter, especially for the students I spend most of my time talking to.

First, let's deal with the "nobody is going to college anymore" claim

You've probably heard some version of this. College enrollment is cratering. Gen Z is opting out. The four-year degree is dying.

Here's what's actually happening.

Enrollment did decline from its 2010 peak. That part is true. But the reason wasn't that students started rejecting college. It was demographics. Birth rates dropped sharply after the 2008 recession, which means there are simply fewer 18-year-olds now. Fewer people in that age group means lower raw headcount, regardless of how they feel about higher education.

And now? Enrollment is growing again. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, total postsecondary enrollment hit 19.4 million students in fall 2025, up from 19.2 million the prior year. Spring 2025 saw a 3.2% year-over-year increase. First-year undergraduate enrollment was up 5.5% in fall 2024. That is three consecutive terms of growth.

The "college is dying" narrative is based on comparing today's numbers to an all-time peak driven by a larger population. By that logic, every industry that experienced a baby boomer-driven bubble is "dying." The actual enrollment rate among 18-to-24-year-olds has held remarkably steady for over a decade.

People are still going to college. A lot of people.

Now let's talk about the money

This is where the online discourse gets the most careless.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in Q1 2025, full-time workers with at least a bachelor's degree had median weekly earnings of $1,754. Workers with only a high school diploma earned $953 per week.

That is an 84% earnings premium. Every week. For the rest of your working life.

Over a lifetime of work, the gap is even more striking. Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce puts it this way: the average lifetime earnings for a worker with a high school diploma are around $1.6 million. For a worker with a bachelor's degree, it's $2.8 million.

That is $1.2 million more over a career. Before we even get into unemployment rates, career mobility, or the network effects that compound over decades.

The Census Bureau released data in 2025 showing that median household income for households headed by someone with a bachelor's degree was $132,700. For households headed by someone with a high school diploma only, it was $58,410. That gap has widened, not narrowed, over the last 20 years.

So where does the "college isn't worth it" argument actually come from?

Some of it is legitimate. Specific programs at expensive schools with weak job placement records are genuinely questionable investments. Student debt at the wrong school, in the wrong major, without a plan, can be a bad decision. These are real concerns worth taking seriously.

But a lot of it comes from a very specific kind of survivorship bias. The loudest voices saying college isn't worth it tend to be entrepreneurs, investors, or tech workers who either dropped out or never went, built something successful, and then told that story on a podcast. What you don't hear are the hundreds of thousands of people who took the same path and struggled. You also don't hear from the doctor, the accountant, the civil engineer, or the marketing director who needed that degree to get in the door in the first place.

The advice "college isn't worth it" tends to be true for a small number of people in a narrow set of circumstances. It gets broadcast as universal truth to an audience of 18-year-olds who don't yet know which category they're in.

What I actually see

I spend most of my time talking to college students who are job searching. These aren't people debating whether to go to college. They're already there, trying to figure out how to turn their degree into a career.

What I see is that a degree is increasingly a floor, not a ceiling. It gets you to the starting line. What you do from there, how you build skills, how you network, how you search, matters enormously. The students I talk to who are struggling aren't struggling because they went to college. They're struggling because the job search process is broken and nobody taught them how to navigate it.

That is a very different problem than "college isn't worth it." And it has a very different solution.

Hit reply and tell me: do you think the "college isn't worth it" narrative is actually changing how students think, or is it mostly noise?

Keep progressing,

Ford Coleman Founder & CEO, Runway

P.S. If someone in your network is navigating this decision right now, forward this their way. The internet gives them plenty of reasons not to go. They deserve the other side of the argument too.