8 Unspoken Reasons For The Decline Of College Enrollment — 'Why Would Anyone Go Into Debt For This?'
College enrollment has been on the decline since the 2010s.
Moren Hsu | Unsplash, martin-dm, Jupiterimages | Canva Not too long ago, college was the ultimate goal for students. A college degree wasn’t just a sign of success. It was the entry ticket to exclusive, high-paying jobs. It was virtually a way to guarantee that you’d get hired by picky employers.
These days, college isn’t what it used to be. A study from Best Colleges notes that enrollment has been on the decline since the 2010s. Why are people avoiding a degree? Well, the answer isn’t as cut-and-dry as you think.
Here are 8 unspoken reasons for the decline in college enrollment:
1. Escalating costs
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: escalating costs. The average four-year college degree now costs over $100,000 for all four years in an in-state institution, according to EducationData.org. The same study notes that out-of-school total costs can exceed $180,000 on average. This price tag is horrifying, even if you get tuition aid.
Worse, college loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. So, if you go to school and drop out, you’re on the hook for that loan. Add high interest rates, and you could be paying that tab well into your 50s.
2. No job guarantee
Technically, college never automatically guarantees a person a job. However, the chances of a hire go way up. This used to be doubly true when it came to highly specialized fields like marketing and physics. It doesn’t take much for people to notice that a degree no longer guarantees a job. HR reps rarely care about degrees aside from the “cover your behind” element of saying someone was qualified for the job. Why would anyone go to college and get into debt if they don’t even know they’ll be able to pay it off?
3. Growing disinterest
A lot of younger Millennials and Gen Z kids have watched as others got burned by the financial pressures of college. They saw teachers who barely earned over minimum wage struggle to pay bills while they got berated by students and parents alike. They saw parents lose their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay college bills. They saw countless liberal arts degrees get turned down for jobs in their field, only to find themselves waiting tables for decades after graduating.
Is it really that shocking that some of them just don’t want to do all that work for nothing? It’s not a stretch to say it’s similar to secondhand trauma from seeing how many people in their lives regret their degrees.
4. Population growth decline
2025 is going to be a major year when it comes to college enrollment and admissions. This is because this year will be the first major year of the College Enrollment Cliff, a byproduct of our birthrates steeply dropping over the past couple of decades.
Simply put, we are not having enough kids to keep enrollment rates up. This cliff was offset in past years by appealing to international students and shifting college attendee demographics. By 2025, even international students won’t be enough to cover the gap. While discussing the population aspect, we might as well look at Millennials and how they upended education.
5. Millennials are the largest demographic in US history
Millennials went to college, but they did not follow typical childbearing trends. Colleges responded to the spike in college demand by creating larger campuses and campus expansions. Millennials graduated. They also have the lowest birth rates among adults their age. For a while, this could be mitigated, but it later became a global trend. There are simply not as many interested, capable students who want to enroll in college.
It’s not always because of disinterest. Sometimes, the low birth rates literally mean the students colleges accept don’t exist. This means that colleges are sometimes stuck paying the bills for their expansions, but don’t have enough new students to cover the costs.
6. No preparation
A more worrying aspect of the lack of enrollments deals with the educational levels of students. According to Above & Beyond Therapy, 19% of all high school graduates are unable to read and are, thus, functionally illiterate. The same article noted that 21% of all adults read underneath a 5th-grade level. If you cannot read at a high school level, you’re not going to be able to pass college exams without retaking remedial classes several times over. If you can’t read and you already know about the scary-high cost of college, you probably will not want to try it out.
7. A trade school boom
The Great Recession (and outsourcing) destroyed many work sectors in the United States. Right now, AI is also disrupting sectors that were traditionally left for college. People who went to college watched in horror as their job wages were slashed and grieved as their white-collar jobs got eliminated.
People began to look at jobs that can’t be outsourced or AI-replaced. Traditional trades are those types of jobs, and every single community needs trades. Is it any shock, then, that trade schools have been booming?
8. Alternative awareness
This all sounds like doom and gloom, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a silver lining to the enrollment drop. One of the more popular phrases said these days is that "college isn’t for everyone," and it’s true. Some students are better served in trade schools or by starting their own businesses. Others might end up getting better wages by having a slick portfolio of design work or by flaunting their time spent in a coding boot camp. Even more might do better in the military.
Today, college is nowhere near the “mandatory” status it once was. That’s a great thing because it means people are beginning to respect other roads to success, with or without a formal education.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer on Medium, Substack, and more. She is also the founder of RaggedRiches, a personal finance site for people who don't fit the typical wealth mold.