As historical dialectics go, it may not be an earth-shattering phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important or even salutary. I think it’s both.
I refer of course to the falling enrolment in U.S. colleges and universities. It hit its peak in 2009 and has been declining ever since. Today, only about 62% of high school graduates enroll in college and only 40% in four-year institutions.
The reasons for the decline are many. For decades now, colleges and universities have come to resemble vocational schools, setting aside traditional goals in favor of greater job security and earning power for graduates. Having done so, it’s unsurprising that, when students are asked why they attend college, according to the Higher Education Research Institute, the two most common answers are getting “a better job” and to “make more money.”
Certainly, schools have the data to back them up. College graduates on average earn more than others – much more. But when financial considerations are at the top of the list – and sometimes the only item on the list – smart students start comparing the cost of college to the potential payoff.
Those costs can be daunting and they’re not going to improve any time soon.
In the 40 years from 1980 to 2020, average college tuition and fees have increased 10-fold for private institutions and 13-fold for public ones. Plus, more recently, colleges have added a mind-boggling number of administrative personnel, each of whose salary and benefits increase costs for students. Yale recently passed the dubious milestone of having more administrative personnel (about 5,000) than it does undergraduate students (4,664).
Declining enrolments and rising administrative costs increasingly burden students, but also mean that an astonishing 60% of colleges and universities find themselves financially strapped. Indeed, according to the consulting firm Bain and Company, “less than 40 percent of large public universities have strong financial resilience, a share expected to decline in the next three years.” In fact, their number is likely to double in that time.
But money isn’t the only thing depressing enrolments (and students).
As this article by National Association of Scholars president, Peter Wood, points out, as important as finances are, there are many reasons why young people avoid college.
It is a place where certain ideologies are so far in ascendency that they cannot be discussed let alone criticized: America’s endemic racism, climate-change catastrophism, and patriarchy lead the list. These should be understood not as systems of belief so much as symptoms of cultural confusion. Contemporary college is so lacking in a coherent intellectual core that anything that students run into that rings of passionate advocacy wins admiration…
One thing [students] learn is that college is increasingly a hostile environment for men… Women now also have to reckon with a college environment where the percentage of heterosexual males has fallen significantly below the percentage of heterosexual females.
What else stands in the way of recruiting the next generation of college students? Animus against white and Asian students. A college that demeans students by teaching them they are unfairly “privileged” or deserving of shame for the supposed actions of their ancestors may win today’s social-justice points but rapidly loses its credibility as an institution of higher learning.
In short, in addition to the high levels of debt many graduates take with them from college, for many of them – males, conservatives, empiricists, those with a genuine interest in education, etc. – college can be a hostile environment.
So why go? Increasingly, high school graduates are not only asking that question, but answering it by choosing another path. One of those paths is toward expertise in the skilled trades – occupations like electrician, plumber, HVAC, welder, auto mechanic, carpenter, etc. I’ve argued for years that more young people need to seriously consider those occupations. The reasons are many.
First, a high school graduate can enter an apprenticeship program for little or no money and exit it without serious debt and with a highly saleable skill. During that program, they will earn as they learn.
Second, what they learn is something people need. When the AC goes out in the middle of, say, a Texas summer, the homeowner not only prays for the repairman to come soon, but shows boundless appreciation when he does. Like plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, etc., HVAC experts are not only valued, most of them know they are and for very good reasons.
Third, once they become a journeyman, in addition to the gratitude of their customers, they can earn quite good money. The average base pay for a person working in the skilled trades is a tad under $72,000 per year. And that’s base pay. If they choose to work overtime or moonlight on weekends, it can add up to a lot more. Compare that to the earnings of a debt-burdened college graduate who’s spent at least four years not earning and tries to get a job on graduation.
Fourth, there are plenty of jobs awaiting a person skilled in one of those trades; that’s one reason the pay is so good. The all-but-ubiquitous message that everyone needs to go to college has produced a surfeit of college grads and a shortage of skilled tradesmen.
Fifth, once a skilled tradesman has the skills and knowledge, he/she never have to ask anyone for a job again. They can open their own shop for very little money and word of mouth advertising will keep them busier than they ever imagined.
Sixth, if they’re of the entrepreneurial bent, they can hire others and perhaps expand their market into commercial and industrial venues. If they prove themselves there, a surprising amount of wealth can follow.
Last, artificial intelligence won’t replace them. The time when a robot will do a valve job on a car is far, far in the future, but many jobs on offer to college graduates are not as well insulated. Peter Wood again:
Into this picture drops ChatGPT and the spreading realization that many of the jobs that have required the skills supposedly developed in an undergraduate college education will soon be obsolete…
ChatGPT and the other forms of AI that are coming along are not going to replace well-paying jobs in the construction trades nor even not-so-well-paying jobs in the health and beauty industries. Why not get a four-year head start, making a decent wage and building seniority in a field that you can trust will still need you in a few years?
A career in the trades – not a bad idea.
Higher education has overplayed its hand. Skyrocketing costs, hostility to all but the most recent progressive dogma, hostility to male, white and Asian students, a “nanny state” of administrators and more all indicate a system of higher education that has for decades assumed it had no competition. But the pushback is under way and, perhaps sooner than later, it’ll have to become less an expensive lesson in ideology and more a service that meets the legitimate needs of Americans.
This first appeared at The Word of Damocles.
