Young People’s Lived Understandings of Postsecondary Value

In recent years, a drumbeat of opinion polls have reported declining confidence in higher education. However, these surveys often fail to fully represent the experiences of first-generation-to-college, low-income students.

To better understand how these students are thinking about the value of college, CARA drew on the principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), creating a Youth Research Council to co-design and co-conduct a research study.

Drawing on interviews with 65 young New Yorkers – and supplemented with close analysis of a wide range of national studies – our research team found: 

1. The vast majority of young people, roughly 75%, still aspire to go to college and want to earn a degree.

2. There is a mismatch between the long-term economic, return-on-investment understanding of college value used by policymakers, and the ways that first-generation and low-income young people actually approach their postsecondary decisions. 

   
   

These findings have important implications for how we resource postsecondary access programs, how we measure and talk about the value of college, and what type of information and support young people need as they make postsecondary decisions.

View the full report at https://caranyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/CARA-IsCollegeWorthit-2026.pdf.