By Korey Moore, Current Editor-In-Chief
Recent trends seem to indicate that fewer students are entering four-year colleges after graduating from high school. Statistics published by a broad variety of accredited public institutions show that growing numbers of high school graduates are instead pursuing other methods of professional preparation, or merely entering the workforce. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a subdivision of the U.S. Department of Labor, announced that in October 2020 62.7% of students who graduated from high school during the previous semester were enrolled at a university, a percentage that was less than that of October 2019, which was 66.2% of high school graduates. While the ongoing pandemic may certainly be identified as one cause for this drop, other nationwide circumstances are driving a gradual decline in enrollment at institutions of higher education. What is causing this decline? Why are high school graduates increasingly not attending university?
Post-college debt is likely a reason why so many graduates are not pursuing higher education. It is estimated the average student loan debt of a universitygraduate is as much as $30,000, requiring decades of payments in many cases. An easy means of avoiding this massive burden is to not incur it at all, resulting in a nationwide decline in the number of high school graduates enrolling at universities.
Traditional thought is that a university degree is a requirement for lucrative employment, and that one’s employment opportunities are greatly limited without a college degree. However, recent studies refute this belief. According to Jeffrey Selingo, author of the bestselling book on college admissions Who Gets In and Why, apprenticeships serve as effective alternatives to a university education and are rapidly expanding in popularity. Apprenticeship programs are periods of free, paid periods of professional preparation in which students undergo training in a professional field. Being described as a program that “ends with a Ph.D.” by Noah Ginsburg, a pioneer in this rapidly expanding institution from Denver, it yields a professional degree that is competitive with a university degree. In fact, some statistics published by the U.S. Department of Labor suggest that a professional degree exceeds a university degree in value, with the median income of professional degree holders being greater than that of university degree holders. The favorable and economical nature of apprenticeships may be one of the forces spurring this erosion of the tradition of higher education.
Amid this growing trend, which is driven by a diverse range of forces, the future of higher education is growing to be a subject of greater and greater ambiguity. With innovations in professional preparation effectively undermining the monopoly that these institutions have traditionally had, America’s universities will soon be pressed to enact massive reform to maintain their edge.