It's not a crisis: Students are saying 'no' to low-value colleges, low-pay majors
- Joanne Jacobs
- Oct 11
- 2 min read
Yes, college enrollment is declining, but it's not a crisis, concludes Preston Cooper in a new American Enterprise Institute report, Learning With Their Feet. Students are getting pickier.
High-quality colleges, such as the state flagship universities, are gaining enrollment, he writes. The "worst fifth of colleges as measured by student outcomes" (graduation rates, earnings and loan repayment) have seen large enrollment drops.
In addition, "college students are choosing majors with a higher return on investment," writes Cooper. More students are earning degrees in "engineering, computer science, and nursing, while low-wage majors such as history, English, and sociology have seen student interest wane." Some well-paid "technical trades, especially precision metalworking, have also enrolled more students."
Students and parents find it easier to track their potential return on investment, using tools such as the the federal College Scorecard and other rankings, writes Bruno V. Manno in Forbes. Many young people, especially lower-income and first-generation students, "are wary of borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for uncertain returns."
The switch to online learning during the pandemic and all the publicity about student loan debt "prompted millions to question the value proposition of higher education," Manno writes. More young people are looking for cheaper and speedier paths to a career.
Of course, the rise of AI has made everyone nervous. Does a computer science degree still pay?
On a visit to Western Kentucky University, her alma mater, Kyla Scanlon talked to a business major who's thinking of dropping out to take a factory job. "Tuition was going up (again) and he wasn’t sure if there was anything waiting for him at the end of this yellow brick road," she writes in The Argument.
WKU's enrollment is down 23 percent from the peak in 2012. The not-very-selective university isn't just competing with other colleges, Scanlon notes. It's competing with the labor market. More than 60 percent of applicants who were accepted but chose not to enroll decided not to go to a four-year or two-year college at all.
I've long wondered how they determine college ROI, apparently based on non-random, self-reports of income of graduates. I've never seen a report that explains -- in detail -- the salary data collection process, reliability or validity. And the oft-cited "million dollar premium" college presidents claim that their college graduates have over high school graduates, at best is based on students who graduated thirty or even forty years ago when college costs were a small fraction of what they are today. A million-dollar lifetime premium on a four-year college cost of say, $250,000, looks like a financial loss, given the alternative of just investing that $250,000.
An alternative to spending $250,000 for four years of college? Invest it for forty years…
These teens need to get a better return on their education investments than have their older siblings, whose generation has recently floundered, in part, due to the irresponsible responses of university systems to the pandemic, which systemic irresponsibility has created a need for more flexible recognition of higher education credits that may be applicable to other fields, as our young adults try to put their lives back together in a time of systemic decline.