College Enrollment Drops as People Opt for Jobs Over Degrees
“Enrollment peaked at nearly 20.6 million in 2011.”
This is something Mike Rowe and others have been talking about for a long time. Why go into debt when you can work?
FOX News reports:
College enrollment drops 1.4% as adults head back to work
Despite aggressive efforts nationwide to boost the number of people who attend college, enrollments declined this fall for the fifth straight year as better job prospects for older potential students and a stalled pipeline of new high-school graduates were compounded by continued woes in the for-profit college sector.
Total fall-term undergraduate and graduate enrollment slid by 1.4% to 19.01 million students as of the beginning of this month, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a nonprofit education organization.
Enrollment peaked at nearly 20.6 million in 2011.
The undergraduate student count fell by 1.9%, to 16.3 million this term, while graduate-student enrollment rose by 1.5% to 2.71 million.
Students over age 24 account for almost the entire overall decline, as adults who may consider returning to school to boost their career prospects are finding jobs instead. That population of “older” students was about 6.63 million at last count, generally concentrated at community colleges and for-profit schools that offer more flexible and vocational courses.
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Comments
I would bet the decline is almost entirely due to the collapse of scam for-profit colleges.
Traditional colleges don’t seem to be losing enrollment (except for Missouri with its self-inflicted wounds).
I’ll bet if they concentrated on teaching vice indoctrination, enrollment would improve. Then they could drop all the BS courses in social studies and concentrate on things which translate into marketable skills