Commentary
Higher education is facing a crisis that nobody wants to talk about. According to data collected by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment nationwide dropped from just over 20.5 million students to 17.3 million in the 10-year period from fall 2011 to fall 2021. That’s a drop of 15.8 percent.
Why is this happening? A number of factors are involved, certainly including both an aging population and COVID-19, but the most important of them is the public’s growing skepticism about academia. We need to disentangle these different factors.
First of all, the overall decline in student numbers actually understates the problem of declining college attendance, because it includes both undergraduate and graduate/professional numbers. Graduate/professional enrollments have been steadily increasing at an average annual rate of about 1.2 percent, which means that the decline in undergraduate enrollments is even greater than the decline in higher education overall….