The question is about probabilities

I just posted about one aspect of a recent survey, What America Needs to Know About Higher Education Redesign from Gallup and Lumina. Surveys are at best indicative and you have to be very cautious about how much weight you put on them. However, they are far superior to having no information or only having anecdotal information which is much more prone to selection bias, confirmation bias, and a variety of other weaknesses.

More than half of Americans agree that a good job is essential to having a high quality of life. Two-thirds of the general population also concur that having a certificate, certification or degree beyond high school is essential for getting a good job.

The actual numbers of those who strongly agree with these two propositions are:

44% strongly believe "Having a certificate, certification, or degree beyond high school is essential for getting a good job."
54% strongly believe "A good job is essential to having a high quality of life."

If you assume that those are conditional beliefs, then you have only 24% of the population (44% X 54%) who believe that a high quality of life requires a good job and that attainment of a good job requires some form of higher education/certification.

There are certainly alternate scenarios that everyone can agree on. There are lots of people who have a high quality of life without a good job and there are very successful people who have never achieved a higher education. But this isn't about possibilities. We know it is possible. The question is about probabilities. And in that regard, it is surprising to me that there is only a 24% constituency that strongly equates higher education with good jobs and good jobs with better quality of life.

I suspect that if you did a survey of those who have been in the top two quintiles for more than a decade, you would find something more like 80-90% strongly agreeing with those two propositions. And that gap between 24% and 80% strongly agreeing is not unlikely part of the issue of disparate outcomes.