Summary
College enrollment among 18-year-old freshmen fell 5% this fall, with declines most severe at public and private non-profit four-year colleges.
Experts attribute the drop to factors including declining birth rates, high tuition costs, FAFSA delays, and uncertainty over student loan relief after Supreme Court rulings against forgiveness plans.
Economic pressures, such as the need to work, also deter students.
Despite declining enrollment, applications have risen, particularly among low- and middle-income students, underscoring interest in higher education. Experts urge addressing affordability and accessibility to reverse this trend.
Colleges are also trying to address this by seriously lowering standards.
One thing I make money doing is essentially getting intellectually disabled people through college. I’m not ragging on my clients, but it’s become very clear to me that universities are less interested in educating these people than they are taking their parent’s money.
I was looking through one of the discussion forums for one of my clients’ English classes and it was genuinely horrifying. I’m talking R1 university, and the majority of the posts were either “AI” generated or were written at a middle school level.
I noticed that too. I was thinking about how housing was getting more and more restricted on campus to cater to ever greater numbers of first year students. And then it dawned on me that the second, third, and fourth year groups weren’t growing by much. In fact the second you got out of first year classes it was suddenly possible to have 15-20 person classes in main requirements.
I wonder how many other universities are treating first year students as cash revenue? Bringing in as many as they can, knowing they won’t make it past spring semester?
It’s prolific, for certain. I have been reading research papers for a laboratory class (3000 level) that are written over the entire semester with a group. They contain errors so horrific that I don’t understand how the student passed any writing class. There were entire paragraphs without a single complete sentence, and others where another paper was cited without any connection to what was being said.
I’m not joking when I say that our response at the academic/instructional level during the COVID pandemic has ruined the intellect of a segment of the population. Combine that with the push I saw ten years ago while working in lower grades to pass students to the next grade regardless of their capabilities and the greed of colleges to get those first year students, as Maggoty mentions, and it’s a perfect storm.