We’re asking too much of them.
It costs too much, so they end up deep in debt. Remote learning sucks, causing them to question the quality of the education they’re getting. Colleges lack enough dorms and off-campus housing is horribly expensive or unavailable, forcing some students to commute long distances or live in their cars.
And why go to college? Entry-level jobs for high school grads are plentiful and now pay better.
The disenrollment trend started years ago, when states began withdrawing support for higher education and the hardships of the Great Recession compelled families to pull back from sending their kids to college. In 2013, enrollments dropped nearly half a million from the previous year (see story here).
Then came the pandemic. In 2021, enrollments dropped — sound familiar? — nearly half a million from the previous year (see story here).
And one thing is crystal clear: It’s males who are dropping out (see story here).
There are several pieces to this. Education for its own sake is, and always has been, a luxury of the affluent. (And, during the Vietnam War, a draft deferment for young males whose families could afford to purchase it for them, which explains how Vietnam came to be known as America’s “working class war,” because that’s largely who fought and bled in it.)
The argument is that higher learning teaches you how to think (I wrote about that here), makes life more fulfilling, and produces better citizens and better-informed voters. (Is that why Republicans are attacking higher education and demonizing professors?)
But for the vast majority of high school graduates who go to college, it’s about getting a good job, the kind of job that can support a family, buy a home, pay for vacations, and send their kids to college. There’s no question that college graduates earn more, way more, over the course of a lifetime. That’s still true today.
But for middle-class kids, deferring earnings and paying college expenses for four years or more has gotten to be an increasingly heavy burden. For kids from low-income families, it can be an impossible burden, not that it was ever easy for them.
Colleges added to that burden by making little effort to contain costs. College administrators acquired a gold-plate mentality, and for years, the cost of attending college rose faster than the CPI or family incomes. This wasn’t sustainable, and families began to “question the return on investment,” said the CEO of a nonprofit that helps student borrowers who predicted, ″There is going to be a reckoning here.″ Another observer thinks he sees “a whole generation of students rethinking the value of college itself … this is much more serious than just a temporary pandemic-related disruption.”
The pandemic and post-Great Recession housing shortage added two new disincentives. There’s a widespread perception that remote learning isn’t as good as classroom experience, yet colleges still expected students to pay full tuition for what many saw as watered-down education. Remote learning also eliminated campus life, a major attraction for young people. And the numerous colleges that neglected student housing were unprepared for a housing crunch that leaves students scrambling for shelter and trying to cope with crushing rent expenses (see story here).
But the cornucopia of fresh-out-of-high-school jobs isn’t going to last. Most economists believe a job-killing recession is on the way, Wall Street does, too, which is why stock indexes are declining now. And there are larger societal implications of young people abandoning the college path in droves. We live in an increasingly complex and technological society, and will need a more educated, not less educated, workforce in the future.
One of the groups most directly affected is employers. The NPR article above from January 2022 (here) says, “Before the pandemic, the country already had a skills gap, with jobs sitting empty because businesses couldn’t find workers with the proper credentials.” A Berkeley economist observed, “You can’t run your business if you literally cannot find people to work in that business.”
Now I’ll add my thoughts. A generation foregoing higher education will likely lead to a competence crisis. The functioning of our economy and social institutions will increasingly be in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing. That will affect everything from the safety of cars and airplanes, to the quality of health care, and the reliability of common goods and services.
I can’t offer simple, pat answers. Broadly speaking, we have to make higher education both accessible and good. States should reinstate taxpayer support of public universities to keep them affordable for students, college administrators must be cost-conscious (trimming overhead, not educational quality), and college ought to be hard. Grade inflation and easy pass must end; college needs to be demanding, so graduates come out of the ivy halls with the competence that’s the whole point of having an expensive educational infrastructure that’s a major drain on society’s resources. Professors need to demand that students learn, and curriculums need to be relevant and meaty. I’m not saying colleges should be vocational schools; their task is to teach thinking, writing, communicating, research and information skills.
Not everyone is cut out for the intellectual demands of higher learning or years of academic grind. Not everyone is smart enough to make the grade, if the expectations are where they need to be, to serve the needs of a technology-based economy. (Our economy needs to provide good jobs for the rest, too, but that’s an issue beyond the scope of this article.) So we must make sure those who have the ability and motivation also have the opportunity, because they’re a societal resource we can’t afford to let go to waste.
I look at the war in Ukraine, and for me, it brings some things into sharp relief. Russia built a vast tank army, at huge cost, and our superior weapons are blowing it to bits. A Russian main battle tank (MBT) costs them about $5-6 million (in equivalent rubles), and a U.S.-made Javelin missile costing $175,000 can destroy it. We can keep building Javelins longer than they can keep building tanks, because at a 30:1 efficiency ratio they’ll run out of money long before we do. The other weapons we’re supplying to Ukraine are better than Russia’s, too. How did we get to this place? Better engineers,* more advanced industries, a larger and more productive economy. There’s a defense and national survival component to educating our population. We’ve got to have better military capabilities than the world’s evil dictators in order to deter, and if necessary defeat, the dark forces that eternally stalk the world. If we lose our ability to stop them, they’ll eventually come for us, too.
(* Russia’s tanks suffer from a deadly design flaw the West has known about for years; see story here.)
So let’s invest public funds in higher education again. Let’s manage those institutions better, to make them more cost-effective, and make the available resources go farther. Let’s make college courses tough again, if they’ve gotten too easy and students aren’t learning enough (this might be unfair; I’ve been out of college for half a century, so I can’t really compare). The problems of housing and making classroom instruction work during a lingering pandemic must be dealt with. Somebody ought to look at breaking up the monopolies in textbook and scholarly journal publishing that balloon those academic costs. There are lots of pieces to this, and we should look at making all of them function better.
Above all, let’s not give up on our young would-be students, and let’s give them reasons not to give up on us.
Those are my thoughts for now.