College tuition has gone up so much and people are in so much debt now that 2nd generation college students will likely have better advice from their parents.
All I ever got my whole life was, "go to school." Luckily I majored in engineering, but I know too many people with half a mortgage in student loans making $12/hour now.
I think I'm going out on a limb a bit here, but it's plausible. I feel much less like I'm going out on a limb to say that if the economy is still sputtering along in 2012 that this is almost certain to happen. (To avoid this we must not merely tread water but see noticeable improvements in our economic outlook.) I'm also curious as to how the bubble pop in higher ed will manifest, because none of the historical precedents for bubbles like this have the college admission cycle to contend with, and most of them involved resellable goods, even if the value did tank. The housing market can collapse overnight because anybody can sell a house any time, college can't be sold and can only be entered at certain times. Still, fireworks will occur somewhere and sometime, for better and for worse.
No HS degree: > 10% unemployment
HS/some college: 7-9% unemployment
Associates: 5-7%
Bachelors+: 4%
Seasonal fluctuations drop dramatically as education levels go up.
I have heard anecdotally that Masters+ is 2%, but the BLS did not provide data there.
The BLS did not quantify the jobs (e.g., the MA in English working as a barista qualifies as employed).
My conclusion is this: the data recommends a degree for employment, statistically speaking.
Furthermore, you mention an economic turnaround, so you seem to be under the impression that a bad economy means less enrollments/applications. It is actually the inverse: http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-graduate-schoo... Wish I had the graph from my graduate economics course for this, it showed just how much an inverse the relationship is.
If word continues to get around that college degrees aren't generically valuable, and adding my personal assumption that many people either can not just become engineers, and/or will realize in advance they can't just become engineers, that trend will stop and reverse. I probably overestimate the abruptness, but it will happen. Increasing enrollment in college during downtimes isn't an immutable fact of the universe, it emerged from social conditions and beliefs, conditions and beliefs that are changing.
That's not so much proof that I'm wrong as the reason why I'm predicting this in the next year or two.
I'm curious though, if you can show some proof for your predictions, as I'm in a sort-of-unique situation; I'm applying this week to colleges for the first time (HS senior) and seeing the prohibitive costs is a bit disheartening, yet I'm not sure what others in my peer-group are thinking/doing either.
In other words, it seems that education is generally a pursuit for personal enrichment, unless you happen to love whatever field will make you money (I thank my lucky stars that I'm in computer science and my internships are quite well paid; my friends in other disciplines like journalism are not so lucky).
I have generally judged people who major in economics here but hate it (it's a big thing at Northwestern, since we don't have undergrad business). It always seemed like those people are saying "I want to get into a good business school and then stuff myself into a suit for the next 40 years"; it's a depressing analysis of one's own strengths. But then again, maybe those people are just smart and I'm just lucky.
I also wish we'd work with kids on finances before they pick a college. Here at Northwestern, student loans are capped at $20k. It's one of the most expensive schools in the US, but the financial aid office does try to keep its students from drowning in debt. Other schools, though, don't really care how much debt students rack up, and they're the ones with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to work on.
Personal enrichment is fine as long as you don't go into debt. Going to college to learn a valuable skill and taking on debt to do it is also okay, since you'll be able to retire your debt with your valuable skill.
But people have been screwing themselves by taking on heavy debt loads and then going the personal enrichment route. It's hard to believe they realize what they're giving up - many of these folks will still be paying off debts into their 40s.