'Losing a Generation': Fall College Enrollment Plummets for First-Year Students | Hacker News Reader

'Losing a Generation': Fall College Enrollment Plummets for First-Year Students

npr.org

4 pointsbrundolf7 comments

> "That's a lot of individuals whose lives are on hold, whose career and educational aspirations are suspended," says Shapiro. "You can almost think of this as an entire generation that will enter adulthood with lower education, lower skills, less employability, ultimately lower productivity."

That's major hyperbole for this situation. An 18-year-old delaying college by 1 year (for totally understandable reasons) does not equate to "a life on hold." I can't believe anyone would blame them for that choice, and in fact, it sounds like the ideal educational stage to be in during this time. You don't have to stress yourself out with the horrors of virtual class. You can just take a break from school and wait for the world to get itself together before beginning the next stage of your journey.

I wonder if this person feels the same way about students who delay starting college to carry a pregnancy to term (or support a partner who is), or serve in the military? It seems like a very one-sided and rigid way to view personal development.

> "They don't know what they don't know," she says. "They don't know that research shows the longer you're out of school, the less likely you are to return."

> Some of her students are calling their break a "gap year," but Cifuentes says it's not the kind of gap year wealthier students might experience. "They're working, and their families are getting used to that extra paycheck. That's going to be really hard to give up for school."

It's not just about that one year

Good point. As an aside, I wonder which organization she works for and why NPR failed to mention that.

1. The students calling it a “gap year” may be a psychological technique to reinforce to themselves that it is just a “gap”. They are asserting to themselves and their support group that they will return.

2. She’s asserting without supporting data that families will “get used to the money”. (because lower class families are just like that?) and put psychological pressure on the student not to return to school. Might be reasonable...might not. Where’s the data? NPR would want that before they broadcast it. Also sounds a bit classist.

I can believe there is objective data that the longer a prospective student stays away from “the system”, the less likely they will return. Whether this is good or bad for the prospective student, short term and long term, is the relevant question. Presuming academic higher education always a good thing could be seen as siding with Higher Ed as just another industry. NPR isn’t in the business of supporting one particular subsector of the economy.

Opening the can of worms of academic higher education as a universal good, there is the fact that a college degree is on average worth X (find your favorite number online), but it is unclear whether this is a class issue (e.g. the college educated would get their kids slotted into a better life, college or no). NPR might not have wanted to get into that discussion, again classist.

Getting an education is still the way to go, or at least the way to bet. What kind of education (vocational v. academic v. on-the-job/Executive MBA/certification) and how that education is obtained in 2020 and beyond (remote, on-campus, autodidactic, live v. recorded) are open questions into which NPR wouldn’t have wanted to get entangled. NPR is nominally serving the entire US population, not just the academic college-educated.

Just my take.

By the time one graduates high school, they have spent the past 13 years going to school. If they want some gap years, go for it.

I realized it long before graduating (and wanted it), but went to college that fall anyway. I didn't like the school, and dropped out after 3 weeks. To say that it somehow condemned me would be enormously incorrect. I went to another college the next summer and graduated faster than I would have at the other place, and launched my career in 2009.

Also, one year of students is quite different from one generation.

I doubt the HN crowd can relate to the general population here. Either these masses prefering in-person class or work environments are losers or this is all good because it sticks it to the dinosaur educational institutions and disruption will lead to some post-pandemic better world.

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