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.
Wouldnt have anything to do with crippling debt would it?
The article says it has to do with declining birth rates
"The enrollment cliff concept came about within higher education after years of declining birth rates in the US, triggered by the Great Recession. Earlier this year, the CDC released data indicating that the US had hit a historic low in its annual number of births – declining 2% from 2022 to 2023 and then 3% in 2023.
“Since the most recent high in 2007, the number of births has declined 17%, and the general fertility rate has declined 21%,” the August 2024 data shows."
While Park said an [sic] seeing an enrollment cliff isn’t occurring just yet, […]
None of those people are 18 yet. The 2007 kids, from when birth rates last peaked, are just now 17. The declining birth rate hasn’t caught up yet.
The article says it’s multifactorial, but predominantly cost and the need to work;
The cost of college is the number one barrier to enrolling in higher education for adults not enrolled in such a program, according to a 2024 report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. That report also found that for more than three-quarters of the more than 3,000 unenrolled adults polled, cost and the need to work were preventing them from pursuing further education.
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.
Man this is the most anti capitalist way of looking at things. This is basically socialism. Not a single NA country would support this system for Europe it’s a different story tho.
Edit: you guys are idiots I’m literally telling you why it doesn’t happen and you downvote me. In my opinion USA is a third world country as long as healthcare is a for profit business. Capitalism is akin to peasants and lords all over again which is why unions form because the working class have to force it to be fair. You are living in a society that values money more than anything and therefore you are just a number they give you one as well to define your being.
They essentially described how the US primary education system works, and prerry much how secondary education worked until Regan.
That you think it’s “socialism” and therefore impossible is a reinforcement of hard-right elitist propaganda.
I live in the UK, a capitalist country.
The Scottish have this already, everyone gets free education including university, no strings. In England we only have it for people from lower economic backgrounds (via means tested grants to pay tuition), but still, we still do it for some people. It’s not a remotely absurd idea.
Hell even most pragmatic capitalists would agree that a free-at-the-point-of-use education system is generally a good investment in the labour pool. If skilled workers are rare, they have negotiating power, and we know how much capitalists just love workers that are able to negotiate from a position of power.
This is basically socialism.
I didn’t even know this site had enough people to downvote someone this much this quickly. You’re breaking ground with your idiocy. 👏🎉
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.
Yeah, it’s because academia has become a for-profit business first, and an educational centre second.
You need some likbez going on. Start with likCEOs.
Drop tuition, bitches.
Congratulations on pricing people out of a college education, have fun with that.
“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.
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.
My professor wrote his own textbook and sold it to us to supplement his salary.
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.
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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.
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.
This country doesn’t prioritize education and then we wonder why people like Trump get elected.
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.
