Only 17% of private-university graduates had not yet seen a financial payoff from their degree, compared with 14% of public-university graduates, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey of 2,002 US adults. The difference is three percentage points — within the margin of error — making this one of the clearest “balanced” findings in the regret literature. This is a payoff-to-date question, not a direct “was it worth the cost” regret item: of the 17% of private graduates without a payoff yet, a further 5% told Pew they expect their education to pay off in the future, leaving only about 12% who said it will not pay off or were unsure (about 7% for public graduates). Both groups overwhelmingly report that college paid off, and neither camp shows the sustained, growing regret that Gilovich and Medvec associate with the inaction side of most long-term dilemmas.
A useful corroborating data point comes from the Strada-Gallup Education Consumer Pulse survey of approximately 90,000 US adults: 28% of respondents said they would choose a different institution if they could decide again, compared with 36% who would choose a different field of study. The survey does not break its findings out by public-versus-private attendance, so it cannot confirm or refute an asymmetry between the two — but it does suggest that institution-choice regret is real yet secondary to field-of-study regret, which is consistent with the Pew finding that the public/private gap is small enough to sit inside the margin of error.
Three limitations shape how this entry should be read. First, the primary data are from 2013, before the steepest phase of private-tuition growth and the student-debt expansion of the late 2010s; contemporary graduates carrying larger private-school debt loads may show a larger asymmetry. Second, both figures measure satisfaction retrospectively from a population that successfully graduated; students who enrolled at private universities and did not complete their degree are absent and likely report higher regret. Third, this entry is specific to the United States, where a sharp public/private cost divide exists. In most of Europe, the financial and prestige gap between private and public higher education is structured differently, and these numbers do not transfer.