College Enrollment Slid This Fall, with First-Year Populations Down 16% | Hacker News Reader

College Enrollment Slid This Fall, with First-Year Populations Down 16%

wsj.com

28 pointsburnaboy9 comments

There is a key subtitle: "Early tally shows sharp enrollment declines at community colleges and among men".

This isn't about the rich/elite/high end schools seeing enrollment dip. It's about seeing the poor and middle class get pushed further back. And the dip among men is particularly worrisome, since it will set them further back in education, leading to further radicalization in this group.

We should not be celebrating this as the "death of academia" - what this is, truly is, the death of the middle class.

We're finally seeing the death of overpriced, elitest community colleges and tech schools siting in their Ivory Tower. You don't need an expansive college degree to work as a dental hygiene or to do underwater wielding. Just get out-there and get some Hands On Experience! There are literally tons of great-paying jobs that no one will apply to because Americans are allergic to blue-collar work that makes them get off their Facebook and roll up their sleeves! Bad!!

Edit: typos.

'overpriced, elitest community colleges and tech schools siting in their Ivory Tower' seems like sarcasm but the rest of the post doesn't. Can I get a /s in this house?

I'm actually pretty excited about the opportunities here. Online courses have so many advantages (replay, fast-forward, etc). Even the online discussion groups running as text are more egalitarian letting everyone contribute unlike the seminar rooms where the bold and quick thinking dominate.

Let's celebrate the opportunities ahead and quit looking back at those overpriced schools. We can get the socializing other ways.

Except the hardest hit don't seem to be the overpriced schools, but rather your run of the mill community college that probably did a better job in terms of bang for buck than most big elite research universities that offer undergrad degrees.

Most tech schools embrace wholly online learning so the Covid transition was seemless. Universities got rolled cause their tenured professors still like to lecture in a traditional style.

For-profit dev programs, or for-profit trade schools? There are some good programs that teach dev and can go online with minimal hiccups, but that's a tiny, tiny subset of technical/trade schools.

I don't mean to paint with a broad brush, but there is some really sketchy stuff going on in this space. I can't sum it up better than the California DOJ.

"Be careful and do your homework before enrolling in a “for-profit” college or career training college. The for-profit college and career training industry is not part of the public school system; they operate schools to maximize profits for their investors. For-profit schools have been accused of fraud, abuse, and predatory practices targeting the poor, veterans and minorities by offering expensive degrees that often fail to deliver promised skills and jobs. Students have complained about aggressive recruiting practices, misleading graduation and employment rates, and illegal debt collection practices—their complaints suggest that many graduates can’t get jobs or afford to repay their loans. If you are not careful, enrolling in a for-profit school may leave you under a mountain of debt, but not help you get a job."

https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/for-profit-schools

Brookings did a whole long thing on it:

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/The-Fai...

"CRL’s focus group research shows that students that enroll in for-profit online programs are attracted by easy enrollment and assistance in procuring student financial aid, but are subsequently disappointed with the poor quality of education provided. Their hopes of improved financial stability through the pursuit of higher education meet head on with disappointing labor market outcomes and unsustainable levels of student debt"

Anything that hits community colleges hard is absolutely tragic, since they're an affordable, non-predatory path to the middle class for a lot of people. There's no community college pressuring people to take out student loans, or misrepresenting career paths to cash in on GI bill money. They offer absolutely incredible value compared to a for-profit college, or even the first two years of a public university.

Technical colleges that are publicly funded. Their market targets students wanting to save money before transferring to a universty and adults looking to go back to school. They are cognizant of adults who work full time and have children so they know devoting full time schedule of courses (or even half time) by forcing them to come to a class every week as opposed to just making online courses that say "Get these things done by these defined deadlines" is unrealistic. Hence why the do basically all courses online save for the ones that legitimately can't (like truck driving, welding, trades, dental, nursing, etc).

Are you referring to community colleges?

In the US, at least, community colleges are the only publicly-funded technical colleges I am aware of that exist on a meaningful scale.

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