Trend of fewer people going to college is about to accelerate

Shrinking numbers of high school graduates are going to college, and experts warn the numbers of college students are only going to get smaller due to changing philosophies and birth rates.

"Universities are already having to deal with declining enrollment, and it's not yet because we have fewer college age youth in our country," Allison Plyer, Chief Demographer at The Data Center explained. "That will happen in about two years. We are going to start to see a pretty dramatic decline in 18-year-olds and younger."

She says that's because fewer people are having children since the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009.

"To compound that worry... is the fact that already the 18 to 24-year-olds are enrolling in college less than they have in many years."

Locally UNO is among the institutions feeling the pain and having to make steep cuts to make ends meet.

Across the country colleges and universities are finding they have to change the basic ways they operate.

Online classes that became the norm during the COVID pandemic may be a matter of necessity going forward.

Plyer notes that many universities who aren’t the highly coveted Ivy League schools are going to have to reexamine cost if admissions. She says many prospective students just feel like higher education is too expensive.

"That's a major barrier, and they are going have to some real financial difficulties if they don't find a way to get more students involved."

BestColleges did a survey and found that more than 6 in 10 Americans said that the financial burden of earning a degree made college inaccessible.

On average college graduates, however, do still earn a lot more than people without a degree.

Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that people without a college education still earn 75 percent less over their lifetime compared with those who get bachelor’s degrees.