NBC: Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college

[Wahoo Redux]

The title says it all.

Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college

An "alarming" number of people are rejecting college — and it could widen the fissures already polarizing American society.

A little-understood backlash against higher education is driving an unprecedented decline in enrollment that experts now warn is likely to diminish people's quality of life and the nation's economic competitiveness, especially in places where the slide is most severe.

I wonder if the backlash really is "little understood."  People resent being judged.  They resent professors for being their judges.  They resent feeling like they HAVE to go.  They resent how much it costs.

Article is based on the The Hechinger Report.

And call it confirmation bias on my part, but this is what happens when you denigrate the concept of "liberal arts education" and forward the concept of 'job placement.'

"That conversation has come up more frequently — 'Is it worth it?'" said Jennifer Kline, a counselor at Festus High School in Festus, Missouri, a state where the proportion of high school graduates going straight to college is down by 6 percentage points since 2017, to 61%. "I just have more and more parents who are saying, 'Nope. You're not going to do that. You're not going to a four-year college.'"

Her students' parents "just don't value education the way they did in the past," said Amanda DeBord, an adviser in a statewide program in Tennessee called Advise TN. "I feel like that's been slipping for a few years."

[marshwiggle]

The title says it all.

Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college

An "alarming" number of people are rejecting college — and it could widen the fissures already polarizing American society.

A little-understood backlash against higher education is driving an unprecedented decline in enrollment that experts now warn is likely to diminish people's quality of life and the nation's economic competitiveness, especially in places where the slide is most severe.

I wonder if the backlash really is "little understood."  People resent being judged.  They resent professors for being their judges.  They resent feeling like they HAVE to go.  They resent how much it costs.

Article is based on the The Hechinger Report.

And call it confirmation bias on my part, but this is what happens when you denigrate the concept of "liberal arts education" and forward the concept of 'job placement.'

The rising cost problem would be worse if people didn't think of it in terms of improving their employment prospects. How much more student and/or family debt would people be expected to accept purely for "personal enrichment"? The only sensible reason to spend that kind of money is if the investment is going to ultimately have sufficient monetary payoff to justify it.

[Parasaurolophus]

We shouldn't forget that the right has been trashing universities through its media outlets (and wrecking them when in power), and that those media outlets are... uh... the biggest and loudest in the country.

It's about as mysterious as the causes of COVID denialism.

[apl68]

I believe that rising costs and students debt, and the sense that it's just no longer worth the debt and hassle, has much more to do with it than any sort of culture-war-inspired suspicions.  It's worth noting, too, that reduced unemployment rates have probably convinced many college-age students that they can do well enough for themselves without going to college.  It's the flip side of all those recessions in the past where enrollment increased as students tried to hide out from the bad job market and burnish their credentials.

I'm curious about context.  About 61% of Missouri HS grads plan to head to college.  Okay, that's several percent below what it was recently.  What was the percentage 10 years ago?  Twenty years ago?  Thirty years ago?  The percentage could have seen a recent decline, yet still be at an historically high level.  That too would suggest that attributing the decline in college enrollments to a widespread societal loss of faith in college could be an exaggeration.

[Anon1787]

We shouldn't forget that the right has been trashing universities through its media outlets (and wrecking them when in power), and that those media outlets are... uh... the biggest and loudest in the country.

It's about as mysterious as the causes of COVID denialism.

Except that there's also been large enrollment declines in liberal Democratic states such as CA & NY, which account for a disproportionate share of the decline even considering large populations. (Perhaps the right would be less hostile if there were more universities like Purdue run by Mitch Daniels.)

I agree that the good labor market for those without a college degree and the ever increasing cost of college are more likely the main drivers of the trend since economics seems to be the primary consideration in deciding whether to attend college.

[Parasaurolophus]

We shouldn't forget that the right has been trashing universities through its media outlets (and wrecking them when in power), and that those media outlets are... uh... the biggest and loudest in the country.

It's about as mysterious as the causes of COVID denialism.

Except that there's also been large enrollment declines in liberal Democratic states such as CA & NY, which account for a disproportionate share of the decline even considering large populations. (Perhaps the right would be less hostile if there were more universities like Purdue run by Mitch Daniels.)

I agree that the good labor market for those without a college degree and the ever increasing cost of college are more likely the main drivers of the trend since economics seems to be the primary consideration in deciding whether to attend college.

The hostile media treatment is on nationwide cable, not restricted to Republican states.

[Wahoo Redux]

I'm curious about context.  About 61% of Missouri HS grads plan to head to college.  Okay, that's several percent below what it was recently.  What was the percentage 10 years ago?  Twenty years ago?  Thirty years ago?  The percentage could have seen a recent decline, yet still be at an historically high level.  That too would suggest that attributing the decline in college enrollments to a widespread societal loss of faith in college could be an exaggeration.

The levels of educational attainment are easy to find.

We do indeed educate many, many more than past generations.

But the context is what does all this mean for those of us in academia now, and what does this mean for the future of higher ed in North America at this point in time?

[Anon1787]

The hostile media treatment is on nationwide cable, not restricted to Republican states.

Why would left-leaning folks buy into the right-wing attack on colleges? I would think it would have the opposite effect and make attending college more attractive. And there aren't enough right-leaning folks in CA & NY to account for such large declines.

[Parasaurolophus]

The hostile media treatment is on nationwide cable, not restricted to Republican states.

Why would left-leaning folks buy into the right-wing attack on colleges? I would think it would have the opposite effect and make attending college more attractive. And there aren't enough right-leaning folks in CA & NY to account for such large declines.

The hostility, when it comes out of big megaphones like that, leaks out into society more broadly.

I, for one, know plenty of lefties who're all over the anti-egghead bandwagon. Similarly, COVID denialism in the US leaked up north, and has won plenty of converts putside Republican ranks. Blasting the airwaves really does work.

[Anon1787]

The hostility, when it comes out of big megaphones like that, leaks out into society more broadly.

I, for one, know plenty of lefties who're all over the anti-egghead bandwagon. Similarly, COVID denialism in the US leaked up north, and has won plenty of converts putside Republican ranks. Blasting the airwaves really does work.

The right attacked universities for decades and yet enrollment increased (Fox has been around since the mid-90s), so I find it hard to believe that it can do much to explain the sudden large decline in enrollment.

[ciao_yall]

The title says it all.

Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college

An "alarming" number of people are rejecting college — and it could widen the fissures already polarizing American society.

A little-understood backlash against higher education is driving an unprecedented decline in enrollment that experts now warn is likely to diminish people's quality of life and the nation's economic competitiveness, especially in places where the slide is most severe.

I wonder if the backlash really is "little understood."  People resent being judged.  They resent professors for being their judges.  They resent feeling like they HAVE to go.  They resent how much it costs.

Article is based on the The Hechinger Report.

And call it confirmation bias on my part, but this is what happens when you denigrate the concept of "liberal arts education" and forward the concept of 'job placement.'

The rising cost problem would be worse if people didn't think of it in terms of improving their employment prospects. How much more student and/or family debt would people be expected to accept purely for "personal enrichment"? The only sensible reason to spend that kind of money is if the investment is going to ultimately have sufficient monetary payoff to justify it.

This.

I can assure you that college-educated people, of whatever political persuasion are telling their kids to "go to college because it's worth it." Funded by 529 plans, to be sure.

If one does not have college-educated parents and/or a 529, it's pretty scary to think about taking on that much debt, even going to community college or a state college, without knowing it can be paid back.

[Stockmann]

Students enrolled in present-day US HE are facing the highest HE costs basically anywhere, in any time period, even as it's a prerequisite for many white collar jobs it wasn't always. Also, college grads struggling to afford housing in any significant numbers has zero historical precedent in the US. Of course there's going to be significant resentment and skepticism over "having" to go to college.

[Wahoo Redux]

The rising cost problem would be worse if people didn't think of it in terms of improving their employment prospects. How much more student and/or family debt would people be expected to accept purely for "personal enrichment"? The only sensible reason to spend that kind of money is if the investment is going to ultimately have sufficient monetary payoff to justify it.

It's a fair point. 

The paradox is that a college education is provably, empirically an economic benefit for degree holders and has been for a long time (the article touches on this)-----so it cannot be simply that.  Plus, studies have shown that people are able to pay off student loans and still have a healthy middle-class lifestyle.

The cost factor is clearly important, maybe the single most important factor, but there is something more than just that.

[kaysixteen]

I think the problem is multifold, and the main factors are:

1) anti-intellectualism and tribal identity politics, reinforced by those media and social media sources, which do gain a great deal of unwitting allies when elite colleges start, ahem, acting and promoting social policies that, like it or not, are just plain hostile to the values of middle American evangelicalism, amongst other such groups (remember that the good job market today still is largely made up of crappy, low wage jobs, many of which would quickly disappear if a significant recession occurred, and these are the sorts of jobs that in prior eras working class parents would have wanted their kids to go to college, in order to be able to avoid-- it is also true that there are many college grads out there who are, by traditional standards, very much underemployed, and people have to notice this, esp given

2) the damn cost of a college degree.   Like it or not.   Something has to be done about this. and many of those peer advanced countries that now have a much greater percentage of their young adults in university-level education, well, that ed costs much much less there.   It will not do for upper middle class folks who have multigenerational college pedigrees, and often accumulated wealth, to whine about people who lack these things not wanting to spend big bucks to get a college degree (which is, after all and taken as a whole, much harder for first gen college students to obtain).

[marshwiggle]

The rising cost problem would be worse if people didn't think of it in terms of improving their employment prospects. How much more student and/or family debt would people be expected to accept purely for "personal enrichment"? The only sensible reason to spend that kind of money is if the investment is going to ultimately have sufficient monetary payoff to justify it.

It's a fair point. 

The paradox is that a college education is provably, empirically an economic benefit for degree holders and has been for a long time (the article touches on this)-----so it cannot be simply that. 

The glaring truth about this, regardless of how much some choose to overlook it, is that there is a great variation in the economic benefit based on what someone studies. Is there a big decline in enrollment in professional programs? Those are the ones most likely to have a significant economic payoff.  People (including prospective students and their parents) aren't stupid. Trying to gloss this is futile, and the declining enrollments make that clear.

Plus, studies have shown that people are able to pay off student loans and still have a healthy middle-class lifestyle.

As above, that depends greatly on what they study.

The cost factor is clearly important, maybe the single most important factor, but there is something more than just that.

The rising costs of education are especially hard to justify in fields where the infrastructure required hasn't really changed over time. In STEM, where things like lab facilities are expensive and need to be kept up to date, increased costs make sense. But in fields where the resources required are largely unchanged over decades, it's hard to justify constant increases above the rate of inflation. Increases in costs above the rate of inflation means that the economic payoff has to be increasing over time in order to make sense.)