Perceived returns and regrets among college graduates

ABSTRACT

We contribute to the higher education returns discourse by examining perceptions among college graduates. Using 2021 U.S. Survey of Household Economics of Decisionmaking data, we observe that over 80% of degree holders perceive that they received positive financial returns from college, while only 7% of college degree holders regret their decision to go to university. However, 39% regret their major choice, and 24% regret their institution choice. Logistic regression reveals perceptions and regrets vary with field of study, gender, type of institution attended, student debt load, and age.

KEYWORDS:

• Return on education
• cost/benefit analysis
• college choice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm.

2 10.1% of those initially contacted agreed to participate, and then 61.3% of those who agreed completed the survey. The Federal Reserve Board has provided weights to ensure that the respondents in the sample represent the corresponding number of individuals in the population.

3 We focused on college graduates in this study because the SHED survey only asked questions about costs and benefits for those who went to college. Future work that also explored regrets for those who opted to not attend college would be very valuable.

4 It is unclear if the questions on institution and major refer to bachelor’s degree regret or the regret from their highest level of education. We therefore assume that the regrets refer to their highest level of education. For instance, we assume that a person with a master’s degree is considering her master’s institution and major.

5 We combined the lowest two income categories due to the low frequency in the lowest income group.

6 We reran the models without the Associate’s degree holders and found that there were not any appreciable differences.

7 We also estimated the model in Table 3 separately by gender given the large difference in means for the two groups. Most of the results were fairly similar for men and women, except that men who attended selective institutions were more likely than women to feel that costs exceeded benefits, women in the fields of health and life sciences were less likely than men to say that costs exceeded benefits, and debt was a more important factor for women than for men. The complete results are available upon request.