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.
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.
I’m bracing for this right now. I’m working casual hours while I go to full time schooling but part of that schooling includes unpaid placements, I’m absolutely dreading not having income for basically half a year while i’m on the hook for tuition, bills/rent, transportation ect…
Yup, and since public schools only teach kids to regurgitate curated information, critical thinking and proper researching skills are paywalled.
You don’t have any flexibility if you work and go to school at the same time. Extracurriculars are tough. Internships doubly so, you can also just forget them if they’re unpaid and temporary.
The Baumol Effect is killing us here. The more productivity gains we make in manufacturing, IT, and other technology boosted fields, the more unaffordable education will get.
That’s interesting. It would be more interesting if universities didn’t use tuition to rebuild their sport complex every ten years.
Oh that’s a whole other issue: inter-university competition. They’re all competing with each other over the same pool of students. Each one spends money to attract students away from the other schools who then spend money to attract them back.
They’re competing for very specific students too though, the kind that become big giving Alumni.
College makes you think critically. It’s good for society overall when more people go, but college administrators have basically turned these nonprofit organizations into money grubbers that have forsaken their original mission.
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.
But Trump loves the poorly educated.
Yeah, it’s because academia has become a for-profit business first, and an educational centre second.
“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.
For me it seems as if those subsidized and guaranteed loans were a bad idea (a system with positive feedback) in their entirety.
The reason education costs are so outrageous is the market created by their existence. And the loans themselves are a perpetually growing moneymaking machine. It’s like pouring water into Saharan sand.
Drop tuition, bitches.
How are they going to get money to pay for teaches, tech, classes, etc? Shit costs money and you need to pay your people because they need to put a roof over their family’s heads and feed them.
Congratulations on pricing people out of a college education, have fun with that.
Hmmm I wonder if this has anything to do with the FUCKING ASTRONOMICAL TUITION
And some of these schools have incredibly large endowments. The tuition should account for the cost of the professors time (and they should be paid fucking well) and whatever minimal costs for using the facilities would be split amongst the thousands of students. But the tuition money goes to the administration and other money pits that do absolutely nothing to benefit the students.
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.
In college there’s no need for a music department unless there’s a class offered, in which case you need the music department? Or maybe we play the administrative skin flutes until they sing or something?
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
My prof back in university wrote his own textbook and gave it to us for free.
Best prof I ever had.
bad news for democrats and our society at large
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.
When I interview new grads, I’m not concerned about detailed knowledge of certain technologies. I’m trying to figure out how quickly they can learn. My favorite question is to ask “what was the hardest bug you’ve ever had to solve?”.
Yep. “What’s the most interesting project you’ve been a part of” is my favorite. Same vane, opened the door to so many follow ups.
So often it’s “how do you translate temporal data for a random forest model” and then see run headlights as I have to explain the word temporal and then how feature selection for machine learning actually works.
They are literally only taught the Python code now, with no explanation of why, how, or when certain tools are appropriate. Real “Bang on a nail with a screwdriver long enough” level education.
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All of my best hires for SE and related positions have been drop outs or self-taught folks. Sometimes there were minor gaps in knowledge of some of the fundamentals, leading to some wheel-inventing but on balance they were far more capable than the average Comp Sci graduate.
The worst hires, almost without exception, were those with graduate degrees. All hat no cattle.
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.
I noticed that too. I was thinking about how housing was getting more and more restricted on campus to cater to ever greater numbers of first year students. And then it dawned on me that the second, third, and fourth year groups weren’t growing by much. In fact the second you got out of first year classes it was suddenly possible to have 15-20 person classes in main requirements.
I wonder how many other universities are treating first year students as cash revenue? Bringing in as many as they can, knowing they won’t make it past spring semester?
Wonder if it has to do with all the “college bad. Why go to college for $100k for a $40k job…” social media trends and the “get rich on social media” trend, along with the fact that college can be really expensive.
Incoming graduates saw an entire generation go to college at the highest rates ever just to find a job market that left a record number of them with debt still on their name more than a decade later.
What were once institutions devoted to academia, have become corporate training camps ran by a board that runs the institution with a corporate mentality, and they enrich themselves commesurately.
Concerning? To whom? The people who profit massively off of students, many of which are going deep into debt?
I would say it is concerning for the future of America maybe?
I dunno, just a wild guess.
Personally, I think the fact that people believe they need to go to college as a prerequisite to success is part of the problem.
I honestly think college is mostly a cultural staple for middle income families at this point. It’s four years of “discovering yourself” and postponing adulthood.
The benefits of a college education are pretty difficult to quantify, unless your intended career requires undergrad.
However, building a career from 0 is pretty painful, and I don’t think most people would have the stomach for it.
An individual person does not need to go to college to be successful, no.
A nation of people will want a certain % of its population to be at least college educated for a myriad of reasons that I don’t think I need to explain here (including to be successful).
When we see a trend of that % decreasing, it makes sense to take notice.
Think of how stupid the average person is and now imagine how stupid they are if they are 5% less educated on average
