As college students excitedly geared up for graduation festivities last week, administrators were perhaps less eager. Ever since the US birthrate began to drop drastically around the outset of the Great Recession in 2007—a decline from which it has yet to recover—college admissions offices have been dreading the “enrollment cliff” due to hit this fall as the number of 18-year-olds eligible to apply to colleges begins to plunge. From devising marketing campaigns to attract international students to cutting jobs and consolidating departments, universities are scrambling to stay afloat.
But the issue colleges face is not just that there are fewer potential students, but that young people are increasingly opting out of college altogether. At root, the current crisis is about the very meaning and purpose of higher education. If universities are unable to answer the fundamental question of why higher education matters in the first place, they will have trouble attracting the dwindling number of prospective applicants. As University of Utah professor and former dean Hollis Robbins, who has critiqued the metrics-driven approach in these pages, told me: “Right now, higher education is optimized for ‘accessibility’ and ‘completion’ ... but accessibility to what, and completion of what?”
Thus far, most colleges are responding to the looming crisis with a business-as-usual approach. Universities, Princeton Review editor-in-chief Robert Franek told me, have been “working to market more effectively to a wider base of prospects, to trim budgets, reduce programs, and cut costs while maintaining quality.” Many are upping their marketing to (full-tuition-paying) international students while also “analyzing population shifts and demographics and focusing on marketing” in regions within the United States with higher concentrations of high school students. Meanwhile, some schools are consolidating their campuses, cutting programs with low enrollment while funding ones that are in higher demand.
Such fixes may keep some colleges from having to close altogether during the coming lean years, but they do nothing to address higher education’s reputational collapse with the broader public. One poll reports that the amount of Americans who have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education has dropped from 57 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2024. Among the top reasons are the high cost of tuition and resulting student debt.
However, other factors are cultural and political in nature. Forty-one percent of those polled indicated that they are fed up with colleges pushing “political agendas.” Many students are disillusioned with professors who promote ideological homogeneity, but the disillusionment extends beyond explicit ideological biases in the classroom. More and more students—perhaps especially young men and those from working-class backgrounds—find themselves out of place in an h.r.-friendly, bureaucratic, and careerist campus culture.
Temple University professor (and Compact contributor) Jacob Shell worries that colleges pressure students to prioritize career advancement over family formation, which he observed ends up alienating many female students from lower-income and immigrant backgrounds. On the other hand, the social dynamics at colleges, as well as in most white-collar jobs, he told me, increasingly “reward types of social skills that women are statistically more likely to have” and thus lead women “to thrive in that environment as opposed to men, and so there’s a low ceiling for young males in those settings.”
This is part of why more and more young men prefer to pursue jobs where they can start building wealth immediately. A number of my own former students who are men from working-class backgrounds dropped out of college in order to pursue work that involved manual labor. When I asked them why they dropped out, most of them cited not wanting to pay for college loans, being annoyed with speech codes, having to jump through bureaucratic hoops, and wanting to engage in work that made them feel “actually useful.”
Friends of mine who have finished college and gone on to work white-collar jobs have also tried jobs involving manual labor. One friend, Alex, told me that he went to college “because it never occurred to me that not going was an option.” He has no regrets, but it was difficult for him to adjust to office life. “At my office job,” he said, “I fortunately had a window, so I often looked outside and saw construction workers hard at work. Something about their manual work inspired me; each task that they did seemed to have obvious and immediate utility, and used every part of their body.”
“These trends have not been lost on college admissions offices.”
Alex ended up spending several months working a construction job before going on to take a job in film production. Though he accepted that construction was not something he’d be interested in doing long-term, he appreciated how much the work had a “low bullshit quotient.” “You can come home at the end of day at the very least knowing that you did something in this world.”
These trends have not been lost on college admissions offices. Franek indicated that some institutions are offering programs that expand local experiential education opportunities, and are willing to offer credits to students for their work experience outside of the school. Robbins, however, questions this approach, as it only serves to fortify the narrative that a college education is the normative path toward success. “It doesn’t matter if it’s prior credit for being a missionary, or spending time in prison, or being a single mother—those things have educational value without having to have the veneer of college credit. It’s the height of self-aggrandizement for colleges to imply that only they can decide when something is legitimately educational.”
Ironically, attempts to “democratize” and “universalize” reinforce the message that a college education is the only route to a good life. I’ve taught lower-income, inner-city kids who had been fed the message that the only solution to inequality is for them to go to college and work their way up the career ladder in a white-collar field, with the help of affirmative action and need-based scholarships. What of their relatives and friends who can’t—or just don’t want to—pursue such a path? Let them eat cake, is the implied message.
Perhaps the solution to the enrollment cliff is not to fight against it, but to welcome its winnowing effects. Inevitably, this will require universities to consolidate and—in some cases—to shut down. When I think of the students in my classes who clearly have no interest in being there, and who would likely be much happier working a full-time job where the usefulness of their labor is more immediately apparent, I can’t help but think that having fewer universities would be a positive development.
The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi suggested to me that such downsizing would incentivize universities to stop wasting money on paying middle managers. More broadly, Al-Gharbi has traced many of our current political impasses to the phenomenon of “elite overproduction,” which occurs when “a society produces too many people who feel entitled to high status and high incomes relative to the capacity of that society to actually absorb elite aspirants into the power structure.” The reality, al Gharbi tells me, is that “the more people enter the workforce with college degrees, where you get your degree makes more of a difference.” This, in turn, feeds institutions’ obsession with rankings and other metrics.
The enrollment cliff might prove to be salutary if it forces us to question the idea that all high school graduates should immediately enter college. The idea that a college education is the only key to a good life is both economically unsustainable and existentially untrue. Rather than focusing their resources on countering the enrollment cliff, universities would do well to let nature run its course and focus on doing what they were always supposed to: to teach students well.