Ditching CollegeIt is imperative that we finally recognize that, despite all the social pressure to the contrary, college is not for everyone.
By Larry Sand
April 5, 2022
One of the numerous reverberations of the COVID pandemic and our overwrought response to it is that many young people are now skipping college. For students who graduated high school in 2020, college enrollment was down 21.7 percent compared with the prior year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. And importantly, if a student doesn’t go directly from high school to college, he is much less likely ever to attend a school of higher learning. Men notably, in increasing numbers, are forsaking college. The Clearinghouse reports that at the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5 percent of college students, and men just 40.5 percent.
While much of the media has descended into pearl-clutch mode over the recent college exit, a reset has been long overdue. In fact, the push for universal enrollment is relatively new. In 1960, just 7.7 percent of adult Americans held college degrees, but 60 years later that number jumped to 35 percent. Writing on the subject in 2017, the late Walter Williams reported that about “1 in 3 college graduates have a job historically performed by those with a high-school diploma or the equivalent.” Williams, citing Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, goes on to say that the United States was home to “115,000 janitors, 16,000 parking lot attendants, 83,000 bartenders and about 35,000 taxi drivers with bachelor’s degrees in 2012.”
Most universities are just not properly preparing young people for the job market. In Harvard Business Review, tech guru Michael Hansen writes that a recent poll of Americans who graduated from a community or four-year college in the past five years showed that 19 percent reported that “their college education experience did not provide them with the skills needed to perform their first post-degree job. Additionally, more than half (53%) of these college graduates have not applied to an entry-level job in their field because they felt unqualified, and . . . 42% felt unqualified because they did not have all the skills listed in the job description.”
Many students don’t even get to the point where they get to feel unqualified, because they never graduate. Research reveals that the six-year completion rate for any degree or certificate is currently 62.2 percent. This means that more than three in eight college students drop out with no credential whatsoever. Per Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli, “To put it succinctly, many young people don’t do well in college because they aren’t very good students in an academic setting, they haven’t done very well in school, and they don’t like it all that much.”
With these troubling numbers in mind, parents want something different for their kids. A Gallup poll from April 2021 shows that 45 percent of parents of current students wish more postsecondary options were available. In fact, there are several.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/05/ditching-college/
