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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago
US secondary school students are increasingly voting with their pocketbooks and rejecting the idea that going to college is an essential stepping stone to the American dream. Even former president Barack Obama — Columbia University and Harvard Law School graduate — proclaimed recently that “college shouldn’t be the only ticket to the middle class”.
As a new academic year begins in the US, tertiary institutions face declining enrolment spurred by a falling birth rate, a student debt crisis, a changing jobs market and political battles over race and diversity initiatives, education experts say. “Public confidence in four-year colleges is at a record low,” Shalin Jyotishi, an expert on higher education at the New America think-tank, told me. Only 22 per cent of US adults said it’s worth getting a four-year degree if one has to take a loan to do it, according to a Pew Research Center survey this year.
Politics matters too: Pew found half of Republicans say it’s not too, or not at all important to have a four-year degree to get a well-paid job, against 30 per cent of Democrats.
“The share of high school graduates going on to any post-secondary college nationwide has gone down from 70 per cent in 2016 to 62 per cent in 2022 and that decline started before the pandemic,” Robert Kelchen, education expert at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, told me. Public scepticism is part of it, and so is the strong economy: “It’s hard to justify going [to college] if you can make $25 an hour without a college degree,” he says.
Wisconsin’s public university system is one of those struggling with falling student numbers: enrolment fell from a peak of 156,039 for the 2010 academic year to 136,643 last year. Wisconsin’s college-going rate for high school graduates is lower than the national average and most surrounding states, forcing UW to close campuses and cut tenured staff.
“People get locked into the national rhetoric that college is too expensive,” Universities of Wisconsin president Jay Rothman told me. But Wisconsin Public Colleges’ tuition and fees rate is lower than the 2024 national average, and “our students are not coming out saddled with debt”.
He also points to a recent report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce that projects 66 per cent of US “good jobs” will go to those with bachelor’s degrees by 2031 — up from 59 per cent in 2021. A recent study from the flagship University of Wisconsin-Madison found that, for Wisconsinites, lifetime earnings increase from $1.6mn with a high school diploma to almost $2.5mn with a bachelors degree.
But Robert Atwell, who served on the UW board of regents and sent eight of his children through the university’s system, tells me UW needs to “listen more to the voice of non-customers: why didn’t they attend a four-year institution? You might find that some of them made a rational economic decision to make $120,000 a year as a plumber.”
Elinor Decker, 20, is one of those “non-customers”. She says she chose a two-year “associate” degree at a local technical college instead of a UW college: “I completed about half my classes while still in high school” and got a good job in purchasing at a local business “at a fraction of the cost” of a UW degree.
Two-year community and technical colleges such as hers could be taking up more of the slack for those who can’t afford to go straight to a four-year college, education experts say. In theory, students can live at home and study cheaply for two years at community college, before transferring to a four-year institution for another two years. But the Community College Research Center at Columbia University says only 16 per cent do go on to earn a bachelors degree within six years, partly because transferring credits can be hard.
Catharine Hill of Ithaka S+R, an education research and consultancy firm, sees a deeper problem: “Higher ed in the US is no longer seen as a public good, it’s become politicised from both sides: the right sees it as liberal . . . and on the left there’s a narrative of rising costs and burgeoning debt”. US colleges and universities are losing the battle to prove they are worth America’s time and money.
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