Education

The twentieth century saw steady growth in higher education in the United States. In 1900, only 2% of Americans had finished college. Following World War I and the passage of the women’s suffrage amendment, college enrollment began to grow. However, the Depression in the 1930s set things back a bit, and by 1940, the percentage of graduates in the U.S. was still only 4.6%. After World War II, the G.I. Bill made it possible for more men to attend college, and when the 1960 census occurred, the percentage of Americans with degrees had reached 7.7%. Then came enormous increases over the next four decades, as the Baby Boomers grew older, followed by their children. By 2000, 24% of Americans had college degrees. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the percentage of adults with four-year degrees continued to climb, reaching 35% in 2018.

BY JULIE WEST JOHNSON

Now, though, that steady growth has leveled off, and since 2019, college enrollment across the United States has fallen by almost 7.5%. In some spheres, the drop is even greater. The California community college system, for example, saw its enrollment decline by 15% in the 2020-2021 school year. Educators hoped that the long-time upward trends in enrollment would resume this past fall, as health worries lessened, but, in fact, in the fall of 2022, enrollment still fell by 1.1%. Michael T. Nietzel, a former university president and administrator, wrote in Forbes in October, “It’s disappointing to see the downward trend in college enrollment continue for another year, even as the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic has eased substantially. The expectation among college leaders that [fall 2022] would be the semester where lost ground began to be made up did not pan out” (20 October 2022). Although this year’s decline was smaller than that of 2021, Doug Shapiro, who leads the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse, said, “I certainly wouldn’t call this a recovery. We’re seeing smaller declines, but when you’re in a deep hole, the fact that you’re only digging in a tiny bit further is not really good news” (Elissa Nadworny, NPR-WBEZ
(20 October 2022).

Obviously, continuing health concerns and the caution they engender play a large part in the failure of college enrollment to return to previous levels. Several other factors, though, feed into the problem, and to probe what is happening, they require exploration.

Increasing Costs and College Loan Debt
Without a doubt, escalating costs have driven some young people away from higher education. In some cases, they have watched older family members and friends weigh themselves down with substantial debt for their educations, and they have resolved not to put themselves in that position. In other cases, they have seen the sacrifices it would entail for their families and have decided that further education isn’t worth it. Last spring, Gallup and the Lumina Foundation published a new study encompassing 11,000 adults who either were or had been enrolled in college, as well as prospective college students. As reported by education commentator Michael Burke, among those students who either dropped out or never enrolled, cost was the most significant barrier for them. Across the country and across races, 50% of students cited cost as their major obstacle to enrollment (edsource.org, 22 April 2022).

A Strong Job Market for Unskilled Labor
The demand for workers—and the in-creasing wages for untrained workers in so many spheres—have lured some young people into the labor force instead of higher education. Anne Kim reported in News-week last September that record numbers of college-age people were shunning school to work (28 September 2022). Among this group, often now called Generation Covid, only 51% say they are considering a four-year college degree, a 20-point drop since 2020. Many see other options for them-selves. According to Kim, at TikTok the hashtag #NotGoingToCollege has racked up more than 30 million views since it became available.

New Learning Alternatives to College
During the pandemic, high school students became used to doing course work at home on Zoom. Now, instead of enrolling in institutions where they would report to the campus for their classes, some are opting for online courses and certificate or degree programs. Yahoo/Finance writer Edwin Roman noted last October that these are “alternatives to learning that just didn’t exist, say, five or ten years ago” (5 October 2022). Students can learn job-oriented skills on platforms like Coursera, the massive online course provider that was founded at Stanford in 2012. Though headquartered in California, Coursera is a global enterprise, and it increasingly works with colleges and universities to provide certification and credit toward degrees for its enrollees. An increasing number of students are seeing remote learning as a viable alternative to in-person matriculation on a campus.

Shifting Demographics
Jeff Maggioncalda, who is the CEO of Coursera, says, “The millennials have come through. That was a very big gen-eration. And part of what we’re seeing is fewer student-age people coming through the system. I think that’s one of the things that’s putting downward pressure on enrollments” (Roman). This is an American problem and does not exist in places like India, Latin America, and Africa, where the volume of college-age people remains strong. The U.S. birthrate, which had been relatively stable for three decades, suddenly fell off at the time of the Great Recession in 2007. Since 2007, it has declined by 20%. According to experts Melissa Kearney, et al, writing on econofact.org, “The decline cannot readily be explained by changing population composition. Successive generations of women are having fewer children at every age” (15 February 2022). The pandemic brought anothersteep drop in the birth rate, so lower numbers in the applicant pools are likely to continue for some years to come.

Declining Interest in Traditional Classical Education
For some time now the standard “liberal arts education” has generated a lot less interest on college campuses than it did formerly. The number of majors in fields like history, philosophy, English, and classics has dwindled, while departments like biology, computer science, and economics, perceived to have “real world usefulness,”are drawing the crowds. Increasingly, some young people seem to be concluding that a degree itself may be irrelevant to life as they now see it, and they are opting for some sort of technical training instead. In 2019, TD Ameritrade, the online investment brokerage, conducted a study of 3,000 U.S. teens and young adults to determine their attitudes toward higher education. According to the study, 89% of Gen Z, along with 79% of young millennials, have contemplated an educational route other than four years of college following high school. Nearly half–49%—of young millennials in the study declared that their college degrees were “very or somewhat unimportant” to their current jobs. Says Dara Luber, senior retirement manager at TD Ameritrade, “More students are looking at online courses, doing classes at community college, commuting from home, or going to trade school.” A case in point was Malavika Vivek, who in the spring of 2019 graduated from high school with acceptances from Caltech, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon, all superb schools. She turned them down to accept an internship as a solutions architect at the Software company Avasoft, Inc. She said, “I definitely thought about going to college because those schools are all really good. But in the end, I knew I could learn more discovering things on my own and working in the real world” (James Wellemeyer, marketwatch.com, 11 August 2019).

We are left, then, with the question of what all this means for higher education in America. Based on what is now happening, the following predictions seem reasonable—even ineluctable:

1) College enrollment at in-person campuses will probably continue to decline in the coming years. According to Ken Anselment, vice-president for enrollment at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, “the bounce-back isn’t coming, or it’s certainly not going to be coming for a long time” (John Marcus, Washington Post, 22 May, 2021).

More and more small liberal arts colleges around the country will have to close their doors. According to last November’s Hechinger. Report, 861 colleges and 9,499 campuses around the country have folded since 2004. In 2021, 35 shut down, a 70% increase from 2016 (Jill Barshay, 21 November 2022).

3) To remain in existence and continue to thrive, even America’s colleges and universities will need to revise their modes of operation. For one thing, they will need to admit more full-paying foreign students, which many are already doing. For another, they will need to come up with more creative ways of handling tuition payments, such as income-share agreements, now in place on some campuses. In these agreements, how much students will eventually pay for their educations depends on their future salaries after graduation. Mark Kantrowitz, a leading expert on student financial aid, says that such arrangements are popular because “they are perceived as shifting the risk of failure from the student to the investor [i.e., the educational institution]” (Alexandra Vollman, insightintodiversity.com, 20 May 2016). Finally, even top-tier schools will probably have to reshape their academic offerings to address more directly the exigencies of the economy and the job world—and the student demand for “real world relevance.” (A corollary prediction: doing so will not go down well with many faculty members.)

For decades on the international scene, the percentage of people in any nation seeking higher education and achieving degrees has been viewed as an index of prosperity—and almost without fail, the countries with the highest percent-ages of college graduates have been the most prosperous. Will this remain true in the future? Further, will “the degree divide”—the current chasm in American society between those who have been to college and those who have not—continue to be a major socio-economic force in the coming decades? It is hard to answer these questions. But perhaps a college degree will come to have a somewhat different meaning in the future—and perhaps other kinds of training and certification will come to have similar prestige. Whatever happens, it would be a sad turn of events for American society if fewer young people continued to pursue higher education, in some form or other. What Erasmus saw centuries ago remains just as true today: “The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth.”