The Political Causes of the College Enrollment Crisis | Hacker News Reader

The Political Causes of the College Enrollment Crisis

themissingdatadepot.substack.com

13 pointsvwoolf53 comments

There's a 500 pound gorilla in the room:

Young men have collectively checked out of a society that has nothing but contempt for them. When the supermajority in academia have nothing good to say about you, opine about how "toxic" your existence is, and openly deride your struggles... who would want to spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars to be "lectured" by those people?

When men are suffering from record levels of depression, dying from suicide and drug overdoses at rates never seen, still being openly discriminated against and laughed at, supporting the system that not only allows, but encourages that behavior is ridiculous.

Oh please, let's lose the persecution complex. If there is any discrimination against men happening in academia it's in the clown show departments that no one cares about anyway.

As for "struggles", study history. The minor struggles that modern men in developed countries deal with are nothing compared to what our ancestors faced. I was never drafted and sent to assault the beach at Normandy.

I mean, the Chronicle of Higher Education put out an explainer a year or two titled "The Male Enrollment Crisis." Not "Is there a male enrollment crisis?" because this is a fact that is not in dispute. Males are walking away from college in droves, they are 40% of new enrollments and dropping.

https://connect.chronicle.com/rs/931-EKA-218/images/MaleEnro...

In case your main way of assessing information is its tribal affiliation (it shouldn't be for gods sake): this publication was written by a woman, it devotes substantial time to black male enrollment where the problem is extra bad, and the CHE leans center-left according to Media Bias/Fact Check.

But hey if you weren't at Normandy you don't have problems right? Good lord, what a non sequitur

There is an enrollment crisis. It is not because colleges are denying entry by men. It is because men are not even attempting to go to college. Men don’t seem to be able to deal with a society in which they are not coddled as much as in they were in the past.

Ironically, your posts are a perfect example of the utter derision some (most of society) give when discussing problems men are facing. This is one reason men are suffering from so many problems women aren't such as way higher rates of depression, suicide, and drug overdose.

There is a crisis with men. But it stems, I believe, from not being as coddled as they once were in terms of privilege. An equal playing field is not something men seem to be able to deal with. A solution will not be obtained by misidentifying the causes. What women and minorities have dealt with for centuries in America is far greater than the perceived slights white men deal with today. It is pathetic that they seem unable to deal with an equalization of the playing field.

It is beyond me how you can write these words and not recognize that they are bigoted.

You keep saying, over and over again, that as a broad generalization you simply believe white men are inferior to everyone else. That in itself is a racist and sexist statement - you're asserting that all people of a particular race and gender are inferior, because of their race and gender.

It doesn't matter if you believe this is the case because of some historical occurrence, it's still discriminatory and just as offensive as stereotyping and discriminating against anybody else would be.

It's not good to assume anyone is inferior and in your words "pathetic" because of their race and gender. I can't believe we still have to tell people this in 2024.

> Oh please, let's lose the persecution complex.

Commenter: Men are suffering and no one cares.

Response: No they aren't and quit your whining.

This is a great example of 'reaction proves the point'.

>Oh please, let's lose the persecution complex.

It's not a complex when it's actually occurring. This is like like Russia telling the world it's not invading Ukraine, it's denazifying it: "Oh please Ukraine, let's lose the persecution complex."

>If there is any discrimination against men happening in academia it's in the clown show departments that no one cares about anyway.

This is when you're unintentionally correct. The problem being critical departments are clown shows, including ones like admissions.

>As for "struggles", study history.

It's clear you haven't.

>The minor struggles that modern men in developed countries deal with are nothing compared to what our ancestors faced.

"The minor struggles that modern women in developed countries deal with are nothing compared to what our ancestors faced."

>I was never drafted and sent to assault the beach at Normandy

This has to be satire. The largest European land war since WWII is currently raging, with drafts currently occurring.

When I was in graduate school in the late 90s I took a flight home for the summer break. I was reading a math research paper during the flight. An elderly lady that sat next to me and asked if was reading a mathematics paper. I said yes. She said that she wanted to study math in college but in those days she wasn’t allowed to. She ended up in accounting. She was still upset over that injustice.

That men can’t handle the present circumstance is pathetic. That white men in particular have a hard time dealing with a more level playing field is pathetic. Stop playing the victim. Stop being a snowflake. Stop being pathetic.

This comment is absolutely dripping with bigotry and absolutely not reflective of the attitude that exists in the higher education industry itself, where many people are highly concerned that male enrollment has plummeted. If you want to be a bigot, be it somewhere else please.

The vast majority of Americans want _everyone_ to be represented in higher education, we don't need to split people up by identity and then tell them to take turns.

> That white men in particular have a hard time dealing with a more level playing field is pathetic.

All men want is a level playing field. Colleges have been discriminating against white and Asian men for decades. SCOTUS finally slapped them down, and colleges immediately started scheming to find ways to be covertly racist through proxies for race. Many colleges stopped using SAT scores, making admissions more subjective, and easier to influence with racial bias. Workplaces are doing the same thing, with DEI hiring goals that in effect mean "no white or Asian men".

Have you considered that your experience as a boomer is not representative of conditions for millennials and zoomers today?

All men want is a level playing field, a few steps higher than the level playing field women play on. (Which they had up until not very long ago, and still have to a large extent).

Viewing things through a "battle of the genders" lens like that is toxic. The men getting screwed over today are completely different individuals than the men who benefited from unfair policies or norms in previous generations. You aren't getting revenge by retaliating against young men, just hurting innocent bystanders.

I’m not a boomer. Born in the 70s. I’m a white a male who teaches in higher education. White men have a more or less equal opportunity in terms of going to college. Until recently college admissions were on the decline and most colleges were way less choosy than in the past. Men are not oppressed. They just aren’t coddled as much as in the past. Men don’t seem to be able to deal with living in a society in which they aren’t privileged. It’s pathetic.

Ah, right. An early Gen Xer, my mistake. Still, you were part of a generation that actually benefited from sexist norms and policies. Have you considered resigning your position to make room for a more deserving diverse candidate? After all, it's quite possible that you only obtained your position because a woman was unfairly passed over.

Sarcasm aside, your performative self-flagellation gives me second-hand embarrassment. The DEI activists at your college will never like you, no matter how much you bash young white men.

I also can't speak for DEI everywhere, but at our school, the focus of DEI is entirely on hiring the most qualified person for the job.

That's fantastic and how it should be everywhere. But that's not what DEI is or how it works. I wish that it did, but its not.

I don’t like the liberal do gooders in academia. The ones who think they are doing something meaningfully good by putting land acknowledgement statements in their syllabus are equally pathetic.

Usually there are a few equally qualified applicants for a given position. The goal is to not carry on the tradition of excluding those on the outside because they don’t “fit” with the current in group.

I'm a Gen-Xer. I teach at a university. My classes are almost entirely white males.

But I do admit my anecdotal experience might not be representative.

Hey. Man here. I grew up with 4 sisters. They're remarkable, smart, capable, and accomplished. I was sold a line that I thoroughly believed well into my 20s that because women can do everything a man can do plus childbirth that my existence was both unnecessary and unwanted. Girls around me in high school wore shirts saying things like "Menstruation. Menopause. All our problems start with men." I'm not in their heads. I can't divine their intent. But it hurt.

I love my sisters. I want to live in a world where they're able to live joyful and fulfilled lives, where their contributions are taken just as seriously as any other competent contribution. I would fight and die for that. I also think that, after decades of trying to figure out what my value is as a non female, I've determined that I'm also human and that I also have a right to life and the chance for fulfillment and having my contributions taken on their own merits, just like my sisters.

I think we've inherited a system that's run with a multigenerational finger on the scale and rather than remove the finger from the scale we've added more fingers to the scale. Standard distributions are everywhere. There will always be others who are underserved or over served. I can't account for all men, but the messaging that I internalized as a child was directed to all men, and whether it not it was intended for harm it left me feeling pretty disenfranchised. Again, I didn't speak for all men, but if there's a possibility that we've disenfranchised half of the species that seems like a problem worth addressing.

And for thousands of years the problems women faced have been caused primarily by men. Now there is “liberation” in some western countries and men have a problem. They think, incorrectly, that they are oppressed or otherwise being discriminated against. It is laughable that this view exists. It’s like whites in the South decrying blacks no longer being slaves and thinking as a result of the new reality that they are now oppressed.

My dude, take a breath. Two wrongs don't make a right. Let's grow together, not at the expense of each other. Find someone and ask for a hug. Your hurt is showing.

There is no expense of each other. Men are not oppressed. They are not discriminated against in any meaningful way. The crisis they are going through is self inflicted. It is annoying to hear the false cries of victim hood. Boo hoo for you that you heard some women say they don’t need men.

I hope you find love.

Indeed. And I hope you can cope with the knowledge that some women don't need men.

Zing!

>When I was in graduate school in the late 90s I took a flight home for the summer break. I was reading a math research paper during the flight. An elderly lady that sat next to me and asked if was reading a mathematics paper. I said yes. She said that she wanted to study math in college but in those days she wasn’t allowed to. She ended up in accounting. She was still upset over that injustice.

"When I was in graduate school in the late 90s I took a flight home for the summer break. I was reading a math research paper during the flight. An elderly man that sat next to me and asked if was reading a mathematics paper. I said yes. He said that he wanted to study math in college but in those days he wasn’t allowed to, he got drafted and sent across the world to watch his brothers in arms die. He ended up in roofing. He was still upset over that injustice."

>That men can’t handle the present circumstance is pathetic.

That women can't handle the present circumstance is pathetic.

>That white men in particular have a hard time dealing with a more level playing field is pathetic.

That White women in particular have a hard time dealing with being the most privileged human beings to ever exist is pathetic.

>Stop playing the victim. Stop being a snowflake. Stop being pathetic.

Men aren't playing victim, they're wising up to their circumstances. They're anti-snowflakes, they know society views them as expendable and fungible. They're done being viewed as "pathetic" when they're dying by the tens of thousands in the largest European land war since WWII.

The current generation(s) of graduating undergrads are getting utterly fucked. Especially the ones that took out loans. Because of the job market, they'll just sit there and accrue interest

It's crazy how much influence interest rates have on the broader economy and social mobility. If the fed keeps rates higher for longer I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a cliff in college enrollment back to where it was in decades previously. And if that happens we could see a similar cliff in political affiliation. Time will tell

The single biggest boost I can give to my child is that I am on track to be able to fund them through college with zero debt.

This article seems to be based on an assumption that total college enrollment in and of itself is an important and meaningful metric, and that seeing it decrease is a bad thing.

In reality, looking at total enrollment rate matters for very few people. That stat is only meaningful to universities themselves and the banks writing student loans.

An individual's life, or society as a whole isn't made better solely by graduating college - at that point its just a piece of paper and a huge expense. What matters is how a person's life compares to what it would have been without college, total enrollment will never tell you that.

Eh, seems kinda linkbaity.

I'm not convinced there's a crisis, perhaps lowered college enrollment is a good thing for everyone. If a student doesn't enjoy it they don't have to go, and if students don't feel welcome in theory the free market will essentially correct without random internet people needing to fret.

I think the obvious thing to do, if one presumes college education is universally good, would be to simply ask the kids who don't like college why they don't like it.

so the article ignores the fact that most of the gen Z college kids theyre ostensibly referencing got a front-row seat to watch their parents struggle with undischargeable student loan debt that likely still haunts them into their retirement.

watching your parents toil in debtors prison is a great way to wind up rethinking your options for the future.

edit: this authors entire substack is mostly posts railing against DEI liberalism and flogging the culture war in general. low effort article.

Especially when plenty don’t work professional jobs anyway as a result.

First, wtf is a "Republican high school student" ? How does a teenager "identifying" as a Republican or Democrat mean much beyond either trying to please or rebel against their parents? Wouldn't this type of analysis make much more sense in terms of parents? Like perhaps Republican parents are more likely to steer their kids away from college due to this perceived trend of "hyper-liberalism" ?

Second, it's gone from merely sloppy to outright fallacious to throw around "Republican" and "conservative" as if they're synonyms, when in 2024 they're completely opposed. With the rise of Trumpism (populist reaction, to use Moldbug's own word), the Democratic party has basically been left as the home of conservatives - strong foreign policy, fiscal responsibility (pulling up from ZIRP), the rule of law, belief in societal institutions, and so on.

Tying these two points together points the way towards useful synthesis - bureaucracy heavy college campuses have actually gotten hyper-conservative (witness the harsh responses against protests of Israel's genocide - still not much "progress" there!). But it's conservatism based on the values of "intersectional" identity politics that have become part of the zeitgeist over the past several decades. The "culture war" already ended some time in the oughties, with the religious fundamentalists losing. Or did you buy into that nonsense that Fortune 500 companies are advertising with rainbow flags to "push an agenda", rather than merely tying their brands to the majority's values?

I'm quite sure there are still actual liberals on college campuses - seeing through the "intersectional" pantheon, but not falling for the comforting destructive reactionary nonsense either - looking forward to actual true progress past both. But as always, the revolution will not be televised and all that. The only question is whether us oldies will listen or if they'll have to begrudgingly wait for our deaths, too.

Look I lean pretty far left. But some times I feel like my fellow lefties are blind to their right leaning peers.

Someone needs to clue the author in to middle skill jobs. Plumbers, electricians, machinists, elevator repair... There are a lot of people going into industry's because of parents or extended family gave them a foot in the door. Because many of them started young and by 18 are already "middle skilled".

You now have kids in red states who understand the math behind loans because they watch their parents get burned, because they use the internet, because they know folks who went to college, didn't finish and spent years paying it off.

Candidly I would grant for many of them skipping school makes more sense than getting a degree that amounts to under water basket weaving when it comes to job prospects.

Young people choosing not to matriculate because universities are too expensive, too ideological, too useless… will do more to fix the universities than an infinite stream of think pieces, congressional appropriations or rubber stamping by the boards of trustees.

In short, the crisis isn't enrollment - left or right. The "crisis" is that an investment in a college degree pays inferior returns. The solution for any given higher edu institution is simple:

1) provide the knowledge and skills that make a degteed student more valuable in the market (i.e., to get a better job, higher salary, etc.)

2) Lower the cost of tuition. Demand is down so price should follow, obviously.

Unfortunately after years of cheap and easy money (i.e., student loans) these institutions have become slow, bloated, etc. Some deserve to perish.

I think you're onto something. My take away is that you talking about elite overproduction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction).

FTA: Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.[1][2][3] ---

The nonviolent unwinding of elite overproduction apparently happened in the 50s and 60s with strong labor unions improving the financial well-being of laborers and high taxes on the very well-to-do recycling their excess wealth back into society. I look at the current shift towards trades as another form of reversing the access number of elites.

IMO, It's worth spending some time contemplating this concept and its potential application to society today.

-----

Side note: every time I say or hear the phrase elite overproduction, I think of Bertie Wooster and the Drones club. You're welcome.

for some reason in this culture, people think that working in an office, having a degree, living in a big metro area, etc makes them "elite". nobody ever called these people "elite" except themselves

That's part of the overproduction process, isn't it? That is, those at the top have those in the middle and midddle-top believing they're on the inside. Nah. They're the suckers. They're the exploited. They're where the wealth is being extracted from. Given human biases and blind spots, no one in that positions wants to admit they've been played.

Geez, look at the article. Written by a leftie for The Left and "blaming" The Right when in fact The Right has it right. That is, "we're done being suckered."

the author isn't left...

> Conservatism and participation in its core institutions - marriage, church, and the military - are associated with better mental health

also anyone who's trying to argue that widespread educational attainment is bad for society deserves to be laughed at

I sit corrected on the author. I should have said "entitled elite" ( which spans political ideology).

That aside...

Anyone who believes a degree === education deserves to be made a sucker.

Anyone who believes a degree === the ability to string thoughts together deserves to be laughed at.

Look around, we HAVE increased the ubiquity of structured education and yet we keep enlisting students who can't figure out their career doesn't pay enough to cover their excessive loans at their "I MUST go there" over-rated private college / edu.

Left or right, the overproduction system is fueled by such suckers.

I'm not sure it's what you intended, but this sounds like you might be saying that a perfectly acceptable future would be to have an elite class of educated, left-leaning liberals who go to college, while their conservative, right-leaning peers go to trade schools. Not all that different than today, just codified, concretized into an actual, literal class system. This feels dystopian to me, and probably would have a bad outcome.

While I definitely agree that going into a trade is a great option, which should be (and, I think, sort of is) destigmatized, the problem I see is that not many plumbers or electricians get elected to congress, or the presidency, or head the gigantic tech and finance companies that rule the world. I want diverse viewpoints among my ruling elite, if I have to have them (which I do). Even if it means I don't agree with all them, and they don't agree with me, I think it's probably better in the long run. Just trying to avoid handing my grandchildren an eloi/morlock future.

>> I'm not sure it's what you intended, but this sounds like you might be saying that a perfectly acceptable future would be to have an elite class of educated,

The meat of this article is that right leaning kids are the ones not going to college. IM not suggesting it, its what thee article says, there's literal data for it.

The folks I know who are hard core republicans all have jobs that puts dirt under their nails. They do the sorts of jobs that your either trained for or have to go dig up some info from esoteric sources (think the whole earth catalog). It's the I, Pencil problem... there are lots of smart people out there who are very educated that have ZERO clue about how the most basic parts of our world function.

Tradies can do well financially, but they're not the ones who are going to end up setting policy for the next generation.

We have a lot of data that shows us it's specifically Ivy Leaguers who will do that, actually - they are massively overrepresented in public and private leadership positions.

Are you going to tell me that if the shoe was on the other foot and the Ivy League was like 90% conservatives, you wouldn't be concerned about the direction this is going to send things?

I think that's the point the person who responded to you was trying to make, the elite class which leads the country, makes the laws etc. should be reflective of the people it governs (that has been a core liberal tenet of the civil rights movement for many years).

I don't want a one party system regardless of which party it ends up being.

Universities train our future leaders and they need to be politically inclusive.

> Candidly I would grant for many of them skipping school makes more sense than getting a degree that amounts to under water basket weaving when it comes to job prospects.

If you have a degree and give people this advice then you're probably not a good person

> If you have a degree and give people this advice then you're probably not a good person

I can point you to plenty of people with no college and middle skill jobs who are happier with what they do and make more than people with degrees.

They also have way less debt.

There are plenty of smart people who have knowledge and training that allows them to do things most college graduates would be baffled by. Looking down on them because they have dirt under their nails was a mistake we made 50 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve1aWWDNJ60 This is middle skill labor in action. They make more than most people who get history degrees for good reason. We only NEED one of them. (And I fuckin love history so..)

Why history major vs trades? Isn't that sort of a false dichotomy? Would you present it this way to your kids? Or just other people's?

Wrong. The problem was when interest peaked and people were giving the impression that the only path anyone should take is seeking a university degree. A whole lot of people ended up spending an enormous amount of money and working really hard on degrees that did not add value to their lives either through career opportunities or the other nonjob benefits a university degree can offer but increasingly does not because so many are just chasing the certification and have little interest in education for its own sake.

Immigration programs like H1B also sucked the market out of low end education required jobs so employers never had to reach out to entice rural kids to getting degrees and joining them. The open door to immigration left those people behind which has fueled the current class/ideology conflict in the US. Donald Trump is what half the country imagines their best case of success would look like because there’s so little of people that they identify with gaining success.

The time and effort expenditure to get a degree is often forgotten. It's the biggest thing, I think, and also the biggest economic impact: all that time spent studying, isn't (directly at least) providing value to anyone except maybe to the student.

>>> Immigration programs like H1B also sucked the market out of low end education required jobs so employers never had to reach out to entice rural kids to getting degrees and joining them.

You realize that to get an H1B you need a bachelors or better, and it's a process. Rural jobs and H1B have dam near zero intersection.

The subset of the youth population for whom attending college has both personal and societal benefits has been far exceeded for some time now. Classic case of subsidies inducing excessive demand, along with all the negative effects on prices (tuition), supply (bloated admins, more graduates than jobs), and time/money opportunity cost borne by the students and the institutions optimizing for capacity.

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