You know college—the hugely expensive four-to-six year investment of time and resources that many students spend their entire lifetimes paying off? Yeah for some reason more people are opting out of it:
College enrollment was supposed to bounce back this fall. Instead, more students opted out.
Nationwide, fewer students went back to school again this year, dragging undergraduate enrollment down another 3.2% from last year, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center that's based on early data from colleges. There were roughly 17.5 million students enrolled as of the last tally.
Combined with last autumn's declines, the number of undergraduate students in college is now down 6.5% compared to two years ago — the largest two-year enrollment drop in the last 50 years, the report found.
That's, uh, quite a big shift. You can assuredly blame some of that on COVID—but how much?
Could it be that more and more people are looking around and figuring out that going $60,000 into debt for a devalued liberal arts degree isn't exactly the best deal?
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