The Political Causes of the College Enrollment Crisis

Look I lean pretty far left. But some times I feel like my fellow lefties are blind to their right leaning peers.

Someone needs to clue the author in to middle skill jobs. Plumbers, electricians, machinists, elevator repair... There are a lot of people going into industry's because of parents or extended family gave them a foot in the door. Because many of them started young and by 18 are already "middle skilled".

You now have kids in red states who understand the math behind loans because they watch their parents get burned, because they use the internet, because they know folks who went to college, didn't finish and spent years paying it off.

Candidly I would grant for many of them skipping school makes more sense than getting a degree that amounts to under water basket weaving when it comes to job prospects.

so the article ignores the fact that most of the gen Z college kids theyre ostensibly referencing got a front-row seat to watch their parents struggle with undischargeable student loan debt that likely still haunts them into their retirement.

watching your parents toil in debtors prison is a great way to wind up rethinking your options for the future.

edit: this authors entire substack is mostly posts railing against DEI liberalism and flogging the culture war in general. low effort article.

Wrong. The problem was when interest peaked and people were giving the impression that the only path anyone should take is seeking a university degree. A whole lot of people ended up spending an enormous amount of money and working really hard on degrees that did not add value to their lives either through career opportunities or the other nonjob benefits a university degree can offer but increasingly does not because so many are just chasing the certification and have little interest in education for its own sake.

Immigration programs like H1B also sucked the market out of low end education required jobs so employers never had to reach out to entice rural kids to getting degrees and joining them. The open door to immigration left those people behind which has fueled the current class/ideology conflict in the US. Donald Trump is what half the country imagines their best case of success would look like because there’s so little of people that they identify with gaining success.

This article seems to be based on an assumption that total college enrollment in and of itself is an important and meaningful metric, and that seeing it decrease is a bad thing.

In reality, looking at total enrollment rate matters for very few people. That stat is only meaningful to universities themselves and the banks writing student loans.

An individual's life, or society as a whole isn't made better solely by graduating college - at that point its just a piece of paper and a huge expense. What matters is how a person's life compares to what it would have been without college, total enrollment will never tell you that.

The time and effort expenditure to get a degree is often forgotten. It's the biggest thing, I think, and also the biggest economic impact: all that time spent studying, isn't (directly at least) providing value to anyone except maybe to the student.