Abstract
Steven Brint on the costs of a know-less society.
Just over a decade ago, a “college for all” campaign was in full swing. Jamie Merisotos, the president of the Lumina Foundation, was delivering speeches around the country about “the big goal” of doubling the proportion of college students with postsecondary credentials by 2025. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was providing nearly half a billion dollars to organizations committed to the goal. President Obama spoke about “putting science in its rightful place” and reaching “our goal of once again leading the world in college graduation rates.”
That was then. Today, postsecondary enrollments have fallen for the 12th straight year. The only other periods of such declines in higher education attendance came during World War II and the Korean War. From a high of over 20 million enrollments in 2010, we’ve seen a tumble to well under 16 million at last count. One headline-grabbing response emerged when Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro recently removed the requirement for college credentials from 65,000 state government jobs.
The warning signs on declining support for college degrees have been flashing for a while. By 2015, Republicans had started believing that college did more harm than good. Two years later, a majority of white working-class voters told pollsters that they considered college more “a gamble that might not pay off” than “a smart investment in the future.” Now the broader public apparently no longer thinks that college preparation is an important purpose of K-12 schooling. That objective ranked 47th out of 57 options offered in a recent poll of U.S. adults.
The knowledge society is expensive, but the social and political costs of a know-less society may be higher still.
This loss of faith in the college degree has a long list of possible causes. College costs continue to take a big bite out of tight family budgets. Degrees pay off handsomely for most, but not necessarily for students who study subjects with low income ceilings at open access institutions. A high proportion of undergraduate classes are now taught by adjunct instructors. These people are underpaid and often lack the time and incentives to provide extensive feedback on student work. Reports from college mental health centers suggest that students are stressed out about their futures. And, of course, allegations about the harmful effects of campus liberalism have been a staple of conservative media for decades.
My research with Benjamin Fields has shown that some of these possible causes are more important than others. The declines have been concentrated in public community colleges, which, despite some encouraging signs this year, have lost more than a quarter of their enrollments over the last dozen years. For-profits have lost a still larger slice. The declines have recently edged into the public four-year regional college sector. (By contrast, Harvard, Stanford, and universities of similar stature are being inundated by unprecedented levels of applications.) Republican governors have often presided over periods of enrollment decline, but typically only in their states’ community colleges. Demography is a bigger factor than politics; in states that are losing population, public university enrollments follow suit. Unless they are combined with changes in state policy, as in Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida, assaults on “woke culture” seem more likely to provide entertainment for conservatives and to reinforce their feelings of moral superiority than to substantially affect college enrollments.
Policymakers are left with two options. One is to let enrollments drift downward and to close additional two- and regional four-year colleges. This would encourage a greater preparatory reliance on apprenticeships, on-the-job training, and internet-based learning. For students whose hearts are not in study, this might be a welcome path. The second option is to improve the value proposition at lower tiers in the system by reducing costs for students and strengthening the learning environments they encounter. This would require, at minimum, investing in clearer pathways to degrees, student support services, more and better feedback to students about their academic performance, and better training and evaluation of instructors.
Better educated people read more, volunteer more, vote more often, are better informed about public affairs, get and stay married more often, pay more taxes, and have longer, healthier lives. The knowledge society is expensive, but the social and political costs of a know-less society for the bottom three-quarters of families might turn out to be higher still.