The Gallup/Strada Education Network 2017 survey of approximately 87,000 US adults found that 59% of those with some college but no degree would change at least one education decision — the highest of any education-decision subgroup, and their most common second thought is their major (42%). A construct caveat matters here: the survey asks whether respondents “would change a decision,” not whether non-completers “wish they had finished,” so it does not directly measure completion regret. Education Data Initiative analysis of NCES and Bureau of Labor Statistics data provides the structural mechanism: about 39% of first-time, full-time bachelor’s-seeking students do not finish within eight years, and some-college-no-degree workers earn a median of $1,020 weekly, roughly 16.5% below the average worker, while bachelor’s holders earn 51.3% more than that group — a gap that persists across a working lifetime and keeps the credential counterfactual salient.
On the inaction side, the same Gallup/Strada study found that 52% of bachelor’s degree holders would change at least one aspect of their education experience; 40% would choose a different field of study. These second thoughts center on major and institution rather than the completion decision itself — meaningful, but distinct from the non-completer experience of lacking a credential entirely. A separate 2023 Dreambound survey found that 44% of US adults regret their college major, with regret highest among education (53%) and business (49%) majors; this major-specific figure is an upper bound but is not directly comparable to the Gallup decision-change construct. The 52% Gallup figure is used as the headline because it shares the survey instrument and population frame with the 59% non-completer rate.
The 7 percentage point gap between the two subgroups (59% non-completers vs. 52% completers) is modest, and both groups report high second-thought rates. It nominally runs against Gilovich and Medvec’s general finding that inaction regret tends to dominate over long timeframes, but the edge is attributable to the concrete, measurable consequences of non-completion: a missing credential is a present, recurring barrier rather than a diffuse counterfactual. The variance in regret by reason for leaving is important context: students who left for already-secured employment or entrepreneurial opportunities report lower regret than those who left under financial hardship or health crises, so the aggregate 59% conflates meaningfully different decision contexts.