Has College Become Both Out of Reach and Out of Touch?

The enrollment decline comes alongside an attitude shift among young people who are growing increasingly skeptical of the traditional college path. Surveys of current high school students are showing a dramatic 20% decrease in the likelihood of attending a four-year college in the past year alone. In fact, young people aren’t the only ones with shifting perceptions about college. A recent survey by the New America Foundation ("Varying degrees 2022") showed that just over half of Americans (55 percent) believe that colleges and universities are leading America in a positive direction. The proportion of Americans who feel positively about the impact of colleges and universities has dropped by 14 percentage points since 2020.

Combine these downward trends in how people are thinking with what’s happening in today’s labor market and it’s not difficult to see that there are some dramatic changes coming. For instance, nearly half (47%) of businesses say they have jobs they simply cannot fill. There are roughly 11.4 million unfilled positions in the U.S. today, many of which do not require a college degree. At the same time, far fewer employers are seeing a meaningful relationship between a college degree and competency, and some 81% of employers believe that organizations should hire based on skills rather than degrees. It’s becoming more and more clear that today’s workplaces require skills that are not necessarily being delivered through traditional higher education programs and workers who are not necessarily arriving in roles through traditional hiring practices.

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