Is Going to College Still a Thing?

For many years, university administrators have been bracing themselves for the potentially shattering disruption seen in other information driven industries. It turns out that declining enrollment after over 60 years of exponential growth makes people nervous.

This concern was palpable at this year’s SXSWEDU conference. In each higher education session, I continually heard industry thought leaders mutter the same phrase during the opening remarks of their sessions.

“There is a crisis of trust in higher education.”

Once I got home and took a minute. The pure adamance and common understanding of this statement began to sit funny with me. In my experience as a professor and academic coach, students from all over the world still deeply believe in the power of a college education.

Students still enter my classroom proud, eager, earnest, late, sleep deprived, disheveled, but committed to the idea that a college education will provide them with access and opportunity they might not otherwise have. They are worried about paying for rising tuition costs. They fear not finding fulfilling work. They would rather watch Netflix than write a paper, but they still deeply value the college experience.

So I got to thinking. Is there truly a crisis of trust in higher education? Or did the enrollment bubble just burst? Is it possible that we’re all freaking out because the market for an undergraduate education has simply normalized after growing from 1.5 million students in 1939 to more than 20 million in 2011.

So before we get all crazy and convince our young people that higher education is obsolete, let’s take a look at what factors might be contributing to the current downturn in enrollment.

There is no doubt that colleges and universities across the country are facing many financial challenges brought by the current decrease in student enrollment and gaps in affordability. Many institutions greatly expanded their campuses, human resources, and amenities to meet the rise in demand and competition brought by the exponential growth of the last decades. They are now faced with hard decisions about how to adjust their business models to what looks like much slower growth in the coming years.

Instead, the decline in undergraduate enrollment over the last years is not an indication that kids today don’t value or trust a college education anymore. Maybe it’s just the end of this particular phase in higher education history. Perhaps declines in enrollment are not a sign of the beginning of the end for higher education. Maybe college is still totally a thing people value, they just need academic and financial support to access it.

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