College enrollment is falling at a ‘concerning’ rate, new data reveals
College enrollment is falling at a ‘concerning’ rate, new data reveals
Fewer 18-year-olds are enrolling, especially at four-year schools. But the number of applications continues to grow
Summary
College enrollment among 18-year-old freshmen fell 5% this fall, with declines most severe at public and private non-profit four-year colleges.
Experts attribute the drop to factors including declining birth rates, high tuition costs, FAFSA delays, and uncertainty over student loan relief after Supreme Court rulings against forgiveness plans.
Economic pressures, such as the need to work, also deter students.
Despite declining enrollment, applications have risen, particularly among low- and middle-income students, underscoring interest in higher education. Experts urge addressing affordability and accessibility to reverse this trend.
Sounds to me like people are realizing that the price of college isn't worth it. You take on thousands in debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, you get a degree that doesn't guarantee a job.
The lie of college for all is only meant to generate profit for schools and lenders.
And don't get me started on textbook scams in college to prohibit used book sales
Congratulations on pricing people out of a college education, have fun with that.
This country doesn't prioritize education and then we wonder why people like Trump get elected.
Don't feel even an ounce of sympathy for these assholes. As someone who works adjacent to academia, we've been talking about the "enrollment cliff" for a few years now. The solution universities have come to is that they should cut admissions requirements to make sure anyone with money can enter their institution, and then do as much creative accounting as necessary to cover up students' failing grades. They'd rather become degree mills than look at the real problem; their tuition costs.
In an ideal world: Oh no! Some of those useless administrators might have to be let go if they aren't getting the tuition or attendance they budgeted for!
In reality: They will cut the music program, funding for clubs or anything else beneficial to students before recognizing the glut of useless admins.
I'm no expert, but I'm having a hard time not thinking this is a recipe for a major generational housing crisis. We're telling kids the "key" to success is getting that fancy college degree, when in reality it's just a bunch of debt and no job prospects.
When are we going to start factoring in the actual cost of a 4-year education? Tuition's through the roof, student loans are suffocating people under 30, and we're telling them "just do it" for the 'sake of their own future'?
And another thing - what's with all this emphasis on getting a "degreed" person out into the workforce? Can't we teach 'em something in high school? Do we really need to be training 20-year-olds to fill up our 40-something year-old retirements?
Higher education is too expensive. Not everyone can afford it. Also, some people can't go to school full time because they need to work. I know some people would say these people should be able to do both, but that doesn't work for everyone. If you're someone who got a degree while working full time, good for you, but I've tried working full time and going to school and I found it to be really difficult. If there comes a point where people decide they have to choose between school and work, well, school is going to lose every time because school doesn't pay the rent.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Higher ed as currently constituted keeps young troublemakers distracted during their wild years and then burdens them with long term debt obligations.
Before we began recognizing the humanity of women (and their usefulness in the labor force), the preferred method of social enslavement was early child birth. Student debt seems to be a good replacement as a social control mechanism.
Zoomers are unaliving the college debt industry
Education to any level should be free at the point of use. Hell I'd even go as far as to say people should be given a (non-means-tested) grant if they go into higher education. We need more smart people.
The more educated & informed a society is, the more productive, safe and free it is. No one should deny themselves the education they otherwise want because they can't afford it.
The American environment of work is going to get a little wild over the next few years. If your job isn't a blunt necessity like an Arborist, or Fireplace technician or something, I'd consider leaving.
u?
I'm a mechanic. We make our own rules. World goes to shit? Inflation gone insane!? Don't care. Pay up or no car.
"Student loans" are now one of the most ubiquitous phrases in politics and it's synonymous with "a burden you can never escape" so it makes sense that the folks who can use assistance will avoid it. The entire fight about student loans has always been to highlight the cost and make some folks turn away from higher education all together. Education has always been under attack for as long as most of us have been alive and this is another front in the war.
First they attack public education and exhaust teachers with overwork with underpayment. Now the right wants to attack Academia, the source of science which shows how destructive the current system has become and how it will evolve. Elon will probably entirely axe FAFSA and funding for higher education, with the aim to have their endowments fed by wealthy elite who dictate what makes it onto a syllabus. The right is so fucking exhausting.
It's not really concerning when it's just plain impractical to go unless youre pursuing stem.
Colleges are also trying to address this by seriously lowering standards.
One thing I make money doing is essentially getting intellectually disabled people through college. I’m not ragging on my clients, but it’s become very clear to me that universities are less interested in educating these people than they are taking their parent’s money.
I was looking through one of the discussion forums for one of my clients’ English classes and it was genuinely horrifying. I’m talking R1 university, and the majority of the posts were either “AI” generated or were written at a middle school level.
The problem is that with the quality decline of high school education college education has become all but a requirement for white collar jobs. Yes, the skillset you've been taught is going to be painfully out of date, but the fact that you have enough preserverence (and money ) for college means that you at least won't be autofiltered by employers.
bad news for democrats and our society at large
A thing that upset me when I went to college (15ys ago) was all the fluff electives I had to take. More than half of my classes were not associated with my major. I was looking into getting a masters a few years ago and one of the requirements was American History, again! I learned all of American history in elementary school, and all of it again in middle school, and all of it again in high school and again for my bachelors and I need to do it again for a Masters? Add along more sciences and math classes for an art related major. While I understand in building well rounded students, a lot of it seemed like it was meant to just beef up the number of classes I needed to pay for.
The number of electives needed was also enough where you only had two options.
- Keep your part time job and take additional winter, summer or night clases and pay extra to get them in.
- Have no job and fill your whole schedule with classes (each class was 3hrs long)
I grew up being repeatedly told that college is absolutely necessary to get a good job and a secure future. And because you've been told it's necessary, they can get away with such a sharp increase in tuition costs. What are you gonna do, not go? Nah, you're gonna sign on the dotted line and put yourself into debt like all the adults told you to.
I've got a degree in a good field that's supposed to pay well. But the job market is such a mess that I never actually got my foot in the door - everything that claims to be entry level asks for five years of experience in a piece of software that has only existed for two years.
College used to be an investment, now it feels more like a gamble.
If I were a young person considering whether to get a degree, I'd think really hard about whether it's worth selling myself into what is essentially indentured servitude for increasingly long odds of landing a "good" job in a neo-feudal hellscape ravaged by climate change.
As an employer who hires folks in the data science field, I’ve become more disappointed in recent college graduate job-readiness every year for the last decade. At this point I’d prefer a resume to say “watched 100 hours of YouTube videos about data science” over a masters in the field.
And these poor people have 100k in student loan debt with no marketable job skills and are competing against 10s of thousands of other recent grads with no marketable job skills and college has created a lose-lose environment.
No wonder enrollment is dropping, the cost of the education is absolutely not worth it and people are starting to see it.
There's been a relatively recent trend of casting aside meritous reasons to get an education in favor of framing it as a financial investment (future income), but I can see why people would lose faith in an education in that regard when the opportunity cost is staggering, and for the past 15 years we've seen people simply throw money into a house or shares of Apple and wind up well-situated despite a lack of education.
I mean, if people say "go to college otherwise you'll be poor", college had better deliver. If it doesn't, doesn't make sense to go to college on that basis
Is that in line with fewer potential students being available? The last millennials are done with school now and the generation replacing them aren't as numerous.
I so hope this is true. We have an extremely anxious teenager waiting for his early decision results expected out this week. I hope for every advantage he can get
Because it's a fucking scam.
Unless you’re going into a field that requires it for licensure, there’s no point. You can always demonstrate skill instead. And while that isn’t good enough for a lot of people to hire you, it’s often good enough to start your own business.
Combine that with diminishing human rights and increasing corporate rights. It starts to make sense to become a corporation yourself rather than a formally educated worker. More pay, more protection, more freedom of choice, and less debt.
We don't need lots of educated people to make products anyway. Mostly just need one engineer to design something, then a bunch to industrialize it and then a mass of people to man/woman the industrialized system that makes the part....ordering, configuration management, incoming inspection, part distribution, manufacturing (assembly work), packaging, shipping, etc, etc. 1 engineer at the top makes a shit ton of people or can make a shit ton of people have a job. So don't need a lot of engineers. But it sure would be nice if you had lots of engineers working together. That's best for having airplanes whose doors don't pop open via the DFMEA process and other such design tools.
I'm not very concerned