A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found sharp downturns last year in enrollments of freshman at four-year and two-year public colleges, and a moderate downturn at private four-year nonprofit colleges.
Recessions are often accompanied by declines in college enrollment.
There were fewer returning students (upper classes), but the decline was not different from other recession periods when household income streams are more likely to be pinched. And as expected during recessions, enrollment in graduate programs increased as job opportunities decreased.
It all suggests that some of the concern about declining enrollment rates during the pandemic may be somewhat overblown.
There are particular circumstances about this downturn that support the decline in enrollment. For example, a freshman gap year during a pandemic makes sense, considering the prospect of spending a small fortune on college with few of the benefits — interaction with professors and fellow students, basketball games and all the other important aspects of college life, including getting a teenager out of the house.
Though there are positive aspects of a gap year, the risk might be a delayed return to the pre-pandemic trend of an increasingly educated labor force.
Another recent analysis, by the Census Bureau — using 15 years of data through the end of 2019 — found a 5 percentage point increase in the number of U.S. adults who have attained a bachelor’s degree or higher. Perhaps most important for narrowing society’s equality gap, racial groups with traditionally lower educational attainment “experienced higher levels of growth (percent change) than race groups that started with higher levels of education,” the report said.
Though the analysis reported variation at the county level, the country as a whole is becoming more educated, with increases in the percentage of the adult population with bachelor’s degrees or higher in all regions.
The census report also had some implicit advice when confronting children who might say they are planning to stretch their education gap into multiple years: “Individuals who hold a bachelor’s degree have higher lifetime earnings, lower odds of unemployment, and better health outcomes” when compared to non-college graduates.
For this reason, extended periods away from college — which risk becoming permanent — may not be in everyone’s best interest.
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