The little-known forces quietly killing the college degree

**David Greene** (0:04)
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm David Greene in for Shumita Basu. Today, is college still worth it?
Earlier this year, New Yorker staff writer, Jay Caspian Kang was doing his taxes with his wife when he started to think about the contributions they were making to their children's college savings accounts. He lives in the Bay Area, where there's a lot of talk about how AI will fundamentally alter higher education. And he wondered what that might mean for his nine-year-old daughter, who will be graduating from high school in 2035

**Jay Caspian Kang** (0:46)
My question was just like, should I keep contributing to this thing? Is my nine-year-old really going to go to college? Or at the very least, is the landscape of higher education going to look very, very different here in 10 years?

**David Greene** (0:58)
This personal inquiry became the premise of a deeply reported series for the New Yorker about the viability of the American university system. In it, Jay explores how AI is already impacting higher education. But he also looks at a much broader crisis happening. How factors like demographic shifts, high tuition costs, and low public trust in institutions are leading to growing disillusionment with college education and dropping enrollment numbers. And underneath it all, there are pervading questions about the true purpose of higher education and whether colleges and universities are adequately serving that purpose today.
So this all started with a really personal and specific question about whether you should still be contributing to a nine-year-old daughter's college fund. Do you feel like in your gut, you sort of knew the answer or was this genuinely a curiosity journey on your part?

**Jay Caspian Kang** (1:56)
Yeah, I would say that 90 percent, I was like, well, she'll probably go to college, right? Ten years is not that long of a time, and American university system certainly has gone through large changes throughout the past 200 years, but it's still there. But that was actually one of the interesting things to unpack while I was doing the column, which was like, why did college feel so inevitable for me? For example, I went to college in 1998, and what I found was that basically we have had 50 years now of unstopped growth in higher education and that that, for many reasons, but most notably because of demographic shifts in the country, is probably coming to an end. And so, I think that maybe that 90 percent was a little bit over indexed by the fact that I and most people that I know have grown up in this era where college just kept growing and growing. The number of people who went to college kept growing and growing in that the sort of inevitability of young people of some means or who could graduate from high school going to college just kept expanding and expanding.

**David Greene** (2:59)
I have to say, your writing got really personal for me at one point because you wrote, Would a 15-year-old hell-bent on a journalism career be best served by working himself to the bone both academically and extracurricularly to get into Harvard? Or should he just start a Twitch stream and get to work? Being a journalist who went to Harvard and spent money to go to Harvard for four years, you really got me thinking about today, my job, was it a valuable four years? I think the answer is a resounding yes.
But I wonder how your thoughts are evolving. Before we get to the AI questions, what is college for today and where do you see a gap between what its stated purpose is and the purpose it's actually serving for people?

**Jay Caspian Kang** (3:45)
Well, when I went to college in 25 years ago, I think that it was much more about at least the narrative that I was told and the narrative that I believe that there was a level of self-discovery that would happen. There are two levels of it. So the fundamental level, which was unstated mostly, except I remember I told my parents, I don't know if I'm going to go to college and they're like, you have to, right?

**David Greene** (4:10)
You will go to college.

**Jay Caspian Kang** (4:12)
The idea was that if you don't go to college, you're just going to fall down the class ladder and you're going to essentially be homeless, right? That's a very hyperbolic way to put it. Certainly wouldn't have been true, but that was the idea that was put in our heads, but it was unstated. Now, on top of that, there was another layer, which was that, well, you have to learn who you are as a human being. You have to learn what you want to be in life. Like, what is your purpose in life? And if you go to this college and you search and you go through all this knowledge, you meet professors who will help you, then by the end of it, you turn into who you're going to be, right? Self-actualization.