Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
Fewer students started or returned to college last fall — numbers were down half a million below 2019 [1]. In understanding those numbers, we should remember that enrollments have dropped each of the past 10 years. Prospective students have been balancing the prospect of launching a career or at least a full-time salary or putting that aside for college benefits such as greater long-term income, campus social life, maturing and finding the right career. It is, as Michael B. Horn and Bob Moesta suggest, “A Not-so-Tidy Narrative [2].” Nevertheless, as Horn and Moesta point out, “According to the University of California, Los Angeles’s annual survey of freshmen entering four-year colleges and universities, roughly 85 percent say they are going so they can get a job. That is up from roughly two-thirds in the 1970s, although down slightly from its peak in 2012.”
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