A college degree is worth the investment. But Wisconsin high school grads increasingly seek other options.

Stafford Wade stepped into the library on Milwaukee's northwest side this spring — not to check out books, but to check out options.

"Not planning on college? No problem!" advertised a flyer for the the Trades and Tech Fair at the library.

Wisconsin colleges have a well-documented demographics problem . Smaller and smaller graduating high school classes have left colleges scrambling to fill seats , squeezing budgets and making painful cuts.

New research on marriage trends and household sizes by the Marquette University Law School's Lubar Center on Public Policy reinforces the demographic challenge facing universities, which aren't only competing with each other for students. They're also competing with businesses recruiting students right into the workforce, and families questioning the time and, especially, the cost of a college degree.

"I'm just not interested," Wade, 18, said. "Four more years of school? No, thanks. I want something hands-on."

Wade, who graduated from Menomonee Falls High School this year, isn't sure exactly what he wants to do. He had been open to college when he was younger, but lately, had lost interest and worried about taking on so much debt.

Inside the career fair, Wade was drawn to a pitch by Raúl Hernández of the North Central Carpenters Union: An apprenticeship he could finish in the same time as a college degree. Earn-as-you-learn instead of loans. Annual wages of up to $82,000 upon completion.

The percentage of Wisconsin high school graduates going directly to college is plummeting. In 2022-23, it was less than 52%. That’s down about 10 percentage points from six years ago, according to state Department of Public Instruction data.

It's a trend experts say could threaten Wisconsin's economic competitiveness.

Michael Ramsey, another job fair attendee, graduated from high school last year and took a job at a local movie theater.

"I felt pressured to go to college because that’s what everyone does and what you need to ‘suceed in life’ or whatever," Ramsey, 19, said. "But I just think college isn't for me. The student loan thing — that worries me. I just don't know how it works. And I just think there are better options right now, like the workforce.”

The non-college going trend has always existed, and tends to increase when the labor market is strong, said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. But Burns thinks there's more to the current dynamic than the robust economy.

"I think it's also just a cultural shift that we're experiencing," she said. "We're recognizing college is not for everyone and you can be successful without college. There are other opportunities for students, and college might not be the best path. I think that used to be sort of stigmatized, and I think that's becoming more accepted."

Special report: Marriage and birth rates, household size, all drop sharply in Milwaukee over 50 years.

The Lubar Center research , looking at changes in the family structure over the last 50 years, found single-person households now outnumber households with at least three people, and marriage and birth rates have declined sharply.

"The future is going to be different, hands down, for education," University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone said. "There's no way around it. We are one of the last sectors that has for a long time, in my opinion, been resistant to change, and whether you talk about organized religion, if you talk about retail, talk about health care, financial services, which of them has not considerably reinvented itself to survive?"

What's driving the enrollment drop at Wisconsin colleges?

Recent higher education headlines in Wisconsin have almost taken on the feel of obituaries: Six public university campuses announced closures. At least three private institutions declared financial emergencies. Hundreds of workers lost their jobs. One private school closed. Another launched a last-ditch fundraising campaign to save itself.

UW-Milwaukee at Washington County student Grace Woods captured the mood by creating a coffin and tombstone sculpture for her spring semester art class. She saw it as a way to protest the campus' closure, which will disrupt her and other students' education plans.

"We need to mourn," she said. "I wanted to make people talk about what we're losing."

As painful as the past year has been, the future doesn't look much better, at least in purely demographic terms. The number of Wisconsin high school graduates is projected to drop 10% by 2036-37, according to 2020 projections made by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education .

Nationally, the U.S. Census shows the population of 18-year-olds is projected to crater through the 2030s, and unlikely to increase through the next three decades, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

There's inherent uncertainty in projections. But existing data on Wisconsin births reinforces the expected decline. The 60,000 babies born in 2022 marked the lowest number of births in this state since at least 1990.

Adding to the problem is the public's increasing skepticism about the need to go to college. The Pew Research Center, for example, reported last month that about half of U.S. adults say the cost of college is worth it, but only without taking out loans. Another 22% said it's worth it even with loans, while 29% said it wasn't worth it at all.

Data shows college education still is worth it

The situation facing colleges is not entirely doomsday, experts said. Institutions have options to address the increasing number of people putting off or opting out of higher education.

"If we maintain the policy status quo right now, I think it's going to get worse because we're not doing enough to attract new students to make college more affordable (and) to promote the value of higher education," Burns said. "If states and policymakers and leaders are aware of these trends, I think there's still time to turn it around."

Cost is perhaps the most obvious issue. Families used to be able to save enough to send children to college; now, many realize they can't even come close.

Even though the sticker prices online are rarely what students actually pay, financial aid isn't always enough. And the process to figure out the actual cost is confusing. This year, it was even worse with the disastrous rollout of a new FAFSA form.

UW campuses have made strides in reducing some of these barriers. A new direct admissions program sidesteps the traditional admissions process. A tuition promise program makes college more affordable to lower-income students. In-state tuition rates rank among the most affordable in the Midwest .

Other reasons people are holding back from higher education include flexibility, conflicts with work schedules, and the time it takes to get a degree. There's also risk of the worst-case scenario: someone dropping out with sizable debt and no degree to help pay it off.

The national six-year college graduation rate is about 64% , according to federal education data.

Key to restoring public trust in higher education is more transparency and accountability, said Ben Cecil, a senior education policy adviser with Third Way, a national center-left public policy think tank.

"If you have access (to college) but you don't complete, then you may very well be in a worse-off position than if you had never enrolled at all," he said. "What institutions really need to focus on is not just getting students through the door, but getting them across the finish line."

Despite the "Is college worth it?" narrative, a degree does pay off — both for the individual and for the betterment of society. There's extensive national research showing college-degree holders have higher employment and home ownership rates . They live longer and healthier lives . They are more civically engaged and earn more over the course of their lifetimes .

More locally, the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum analyzed expected job openings across the state through 2030. It found nearly two-thirds of the jobs paying at least $50,000 require a college degree and projected demand will continue to grow.

Colleges need to do a better job conveying that message, UWM's Mone said.

"We're future-proofing individuals in a huge way," he said. "That's what college can do."

Other sectors have reinvented themselves. Now, it is education's turn.

The numbers on the computer screen scared Dylan Bendure. They showed cost estimates to attend a few colleges, part of a career planning exercise his class completed a few years ago.

"I remember seeing some big numbers, and I'm like, oh shoot, that does not look fun," Bendure, 19, recalled. "I just thought that's more than I have right now, so I don't really want to go there and pay monthly payments and whatnot."

When Bendure graduated in 2023 from Hilbert High School, about 20 miles east of Appleton, he hadn't submitted a single college application. While he had toyed with the idea of becoming an electrical engineer, Bendure decided to join the workforce instead, just like his parents did.

Sargento, where Bendure worked part time through high school, was happy to hire him full time. Starting wages at the cheese manufacturer are $25.77 per hour, or about $53,600 annually. Because Bendure works second shift — "I'm not a morning person," he said — he gets paid extra.

Bendure's best friends took a different path and enrolled at UW-Green Bay.

Bendure doesn't feel like he's missing out. If anything, it reinforces he made the right decision. While one of them borrows their parents' car, Bendure bought his own. While they may graduate with debt, Bendure sees himself potentially pursuing higher education through an apprenticeship or Sargento's tuition reimbursement program.

"It just seems like a better option financially," he said.

High schools are taking a more active role in exposing students to career options through youth apprenticeships, job shadows and more.

Mike Trimberger, superintendent of the Random Lake School District about 40 miles north of Milwaukee, said the narrative pushed in schools for decades was simple: Go to college. He started noticing a shift around 2012 after a new state law required every high school graduate to have an academic career plan.

"You're now seeing adults in schools talk to kids differently, and students now making better decisions about what their next step after high school is," Trimberger said.

Students may pursue college later in life, and increasingly through an employer. Universities can play a larger role in upskilling and reskilling workers.

"It's going to be a different kind of student than having a bunch of 18-year-olds in their hallways," Trimberger said.

Mone sees this as a big part of UWM's future. The university will lean further into continuing education credits, certificates, badges and industry partnerships, such as a recently announced aritificial intelligence initiative with Microsoft.

Connecting programs to career pathways is key

If Chad Frey could do it over, he would have avoided college altogether. But he graduated from Franklin High School in 2014, a time when college felt like the only option to be successful.

"If you didn't go to college, you had to figure something else out and you had to get lucky, I guess, is the way they made it seem," said Frey, 28.

Frey enrolled at UW-Waukesha − now called UW-Milwaukee at Waukesha, which will close in spring 2025 . He didn't like sitting in a desk all day, felt like he wasn't "wired that way." His breaking point came when he had to take a required gym class credit.

"It just kind of seemed a little bit ridiculous in a way that that was even something that was mandatory for me to be able to get a degree," he recalled. "It just seemed like I was giving them money for no reason and it didn't have anything to do with my actual studies."

Colleges need to prove their relevance to the students they serve by adjusting programming in response to student interests and workforce needs, said Robert Zemsky, a higher education researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.

"What we see is an industry that isn’t being smart, isn’t looking at the curriculum, isn’t being student-centered and is wandering all over the place," Zemsky said. "That is just going to keep the closures going because there’s no countervailing to the funk."

Universities are trying to make the connections between academic disciplines and careers clearer. UW-Oshkosh, for example, is undergoing a massive restructuring of colleges, schools and departments into "career clusters" that will be more familiar to students and connect them to job pathways.

"We need to be able to better communicate what we do, how we do it, and therefore what the value of that degree is," UW-Oshkosh Provost Ed Martini said.

The message didn't arrive in time for Frey. He dropped out and found his way to a five-year apprenticeship with the steamfitters union. He now earns more than $100,000 annually.

In Frey's free time, he returns to Franklin High School to share his story with students wondering what's next after graduation. He said many find his pitch compelling.

"It's just mind-blowing (to them) to think it's possible to make a good living wage not going to college," he said.

This project is supported by a grant from Marquette University Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, to make possible journalism on issues of importance to the Milwaukee area. All the work was done under the guidance of Journal Sentinel editors.

Contact Kelly Meyerhofer at kmeyerhofer@gannett.com or 414-223-5168. Follow her on X (Twitter) at @KellyMeyerhofer .

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: A college degree is worth the investment. But Wisconsin high school grads increasingly seek other options.