Don't send your kids to college

on the 2025 enrollment cliff

@revolvingstyle

So back in 2024, I wrote a piece for the NYTimes about the closure of St. John’s small Staten Island campus (where I used to teach), and how it was a harbinger of more closures to come. Robert Franek of the Princeton Review brought to my attention that the drop in 18-year-olds in 2025 (thanks to a major drop in birth rates in 2007) would further accelerate the closure of small colleges/campuses.

In the Times piece, I took a kinda crunchy, pro-subsidiarity angle, arguing that small campuses are healthier for students than giant ones, because there’s more likely to be a stronger sense of community and a “human touch” on campus. But in my piece in Compact last month, I took a less rosy and more cynical position, arguing that maybe all these colleges closing will be a good thing—and that perhaps it will discourage young people from going to college altogether (which could also be a good thing).

As college students excitedly geared up for graduation festivities last week, administrators were perhaps less eager. Ever since the US birthrate began to drop drastically around the outset of the Great Recession in 2007—a decline from which it has yet to recover—college admissions offices have been dreading the “enrollment cliff” due to hit this fall as the number of 18-year-olds eligible to apply to colleges begins to plunge. From devising marketing campaigns to attract international students to cutting jobs and consolidating departments, universities are scrambling to stay afloat.

But the issue colleges face is not just that there are fewer potential students, but that young people are increasingly opting out of college altogether. At root, the current crisis is about the very meaning and purpose of higher education. If universities are unable to answer the fundamental question of why higher education matters in the first place, they will have trouble attracting the dwindling number of prospective applicants. As University of Utah professor and former dean

Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal)

, who has critiqued the metrics-driven approach in these pages, told me: “Right now, higher education is optimized for ‘accessibility’ and ‘completion’ ... but accessibility to what, and completion of what?”

The increasingly corporate model that universities are adopting and the campus culture it propagates are signs that universities have lost sight of their ultimate telos, and risk alienating the waning number of prospective applicants—especially working-class males—who are beginning to question the narrative that holds that a college degree is the indispensable key that unlocks the door to a successful and fulfilling life. This, compounded with the threat already posed by population decline, should incite a mass reevaluation of the foundational assumptions undergirding the American university system.

Thus far, most colleges are responding to the looming crisis with a business-as-usual approach. Universities, Princeton Review editor-in-chief Robert Franek told me, […] are upping their marketing to (full-tuition-paying) international students while also “analyzing population shifts and demographics and focusing on marketing” in regions within the United States with higher concentrations of high school students.

Yet Robbins warns that too many administrators fail to “keep their ears to the ground,” fearing that the solutions they are proposing are out of touch with the real needs of students and faculty. One poll reports that the amount of Americans who have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education has dropped from 57 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2024. Among the top reasons are the high cost of tuition and resultant loan debt.

However, other factors are cultural and political in nature. Forty-one percent of those polled indicated that they are fed up with colleges pushing “political agendas.” Many students are disillusioned with professors who promote ideological homogeneity, but the disillusionment extends beyond explicit ideological biases in the classroom. More and more students—perhaps especially young men and those from working-class backgrounds—find themselves out of place in an h.r.-friendly, bureaucratic, and careerist campus culture.

Temple University professor (and Compact contributor) Jacob Shell worries that colleges pressure students to prioritize career advancement over family formation, which he observed ends up alienating many female students from lower-income and immigrant backgrounds. On the other hand, the social dynamics at colleges, as well as in most white-collar jobs, he told me, increasingly “reward types of social skills that women are statistically more likely to have” and thus lead women “to thrive in that environment as opposed to men, and so there’s a low ceiling for young males in those settings.”

This is part of why more and more young men prefer to pursue jobs where they can start building wealth immediately. A number of my own former students who are men from working-class backgrounds dropped out of college in order to pursue work that involved manual labor. When I asked them why they dropped out, most of them cited not wanting to pay for college loans, being annoyed with speech codes, having to jump through bureaucratic hoops, and wanting to engage in work that made them feel “actually useful.”

Many of these young guys drop out of college or opt out of white-collar labor not only because they feel they don’t “fit in,” but because they see something inherently meaningful and fulfilling in doing manual labor.

Friends of mine who have finished college and gone on to work white-collar jobs have also tried jobs involving manual labor. One friend, Alex, told me that he went to college “because it never occurred to me that not going was an option.” He has no regrets, but it was difficult for him to adjust to office life. “At my office job,” he said, “I fortunately had a window, so I often looked outside and saw construction workers hard at work. Something about their manual work inspired me; each task that they did seemed to have obvious and immediate utility, and used every part of their body.”

Alex ended up spending several months working a construction job before going on to take a job in film production. Though he accepted that construction was not something he’d be interested in doing long-term, he appreciated how much the work had a “low bullshit quotient.” “You can come home at the end of day at the very least knowing that you did something in this world.”

These trends have not been lost on college admissions offices. Franek indicated that some institutions are offering programs that expand local experiential education opportunities, and are willing to offer credits to students for their work experience outside of the school. Robbins, however, questions this approach, as it only serves to fortify the narrative that a college education is the normative path toward success. “It doesn’t matter if it’s prior credit for being a missionary, or spending time in prison, or being a single mother—those things have educational value without having to have the veneer of college credit. It’s the height of self-aggrandizement for colleges to imply that only they can decide when something is legitimately educational.”

Ironically, attempts to “democratize” and “universalize” reinforce the message that a college education is the only route to a good life. I’ve taught lower-income, inner-city kids who had been fed the message that the only solution to inequality is for them to go to college and work their way up the career ladder in a white-collar field, with the help of affirmative action and need-based scholarships. What of their relatives and friends who can’t—or just don’t want to—pursue such a path? Let them eat cake, is the implied message.

In the words of the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich, “universal education through schooling is not feasible…Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education.” His “deschooling” movement insisted that “the current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.”

I wrote about the naivete and elitism that lurks behind the alleged “egalitarianism” of “universal education” (see my take on Lasch’s critique of Horace Mann’s Common Schools movement) and the idea that the solution to poverty is to fast-track high-performing lower-income folks into elite schools and career fields, rather than to implement public policy that strengthens working class communities. As I wrote for Compact’s Substack last year:

While teaching at an inner-city school in New Jersey, I came to understand well the tension between said “false progressivism” and authentic proletarian politics. Upon being asked about the solution to black poverty, a (black) establishment Democratic politician told one of my students that youth of color needed more access to STEM programs so they can get lucrative jobs after college…“so they can help their communities,” he added, mechanically.

Nothing against STEM, but to posit that the “solution” to poverty–no matter what color or ethnicity it comes in–is to work your way up the neoliberal ladder of success–alone–is anything but progressive. […]

Elitist pandering on identitarian issues is more often than not a mask for their disdain for working-class culture and its esteem for community and belonging.

Christopher Smalls also echoed this sentiment when I interviewed him about the Amazon Labor Union:

Smalls powerfully rejects the notion, still touted by even many liberals, that “social mobility” is the cure to workers’ plight. Mobility isn’t an appealing—let alone feasible—option for everyone. “People work at Amazon because it’s not a hard job…. I worked there for years. And if it had the right safety net, it would be a really decent job.” Smalls’s approach champions the interests of those who are more intent on improving their conditions “as is,” in the here and now.

And this is why I argue that the enrollment cliff—as much as it will put colleges in a very, very tough situation—might not be such a bad thing after all:

Perhaps the solution to the enrollment cliff is not to fight against it, but to welcome its winnowing effects. Inevitably, this will require universities to consolidate and—in some cases—to shut down. When I think of the students in my classes who clearly have no interest in being there, and who would likely be much happier working a full-time job where the usefulness of their labor is more immediately apparent, I can’t help but think that having fewer universities would be a positive development.

The sociologist

Musa al-Gharbi

suggested to me that such downsizing would incentivize universities to stop wasting money on paying middle managers. More broadly, Al-Gharbi has traced many of our current political impasses to the phenomenon of “elite overproduction,” which occurs when “a society produces too many people who feel entitled to high status and high incomes relative to the capacity of that society to actually absorb elite aspirants into the power structure.” The reality, al Gharbi tells me, is that “the more people enter the workforce with college degrees, where you get your degree makes more of a difference.” This, in turn, feeds institutions’ obsession with rankings and other metrics.

Were there to be smaller (or less) universities, they would be forced to be more selective, enabling them to raise their academic standards, and would spare prospective students from the consequences of a job market already jammed with elite overproduction. “If admission rates were lower,” says al-Gharbi, “it would probably push a lot of people who are not an ideal fit for academia to do something else, because they would just get denied entry. They’d be well served if they instead focused on community college or learning a trade instead of wasting their time and money on a four-year school.”

This is why I think college should not be the default (or immediate) option for ALL students who graduate high school—especially not for working-class boys. If you are intelligent, have a passion for classroom-learning, and know that the career path you feel called to will require a college education, then go for it. But if you don’t want to go to college—or aren’t really sure about it—you should not be made to feel that it’s the best or only option for you. How about go to a trade school, do an apprenticeship program, then start your own business and make bank way before your college-educated peers do.

The risk of not normalizing trade schools and other alternatives to college is that you funnel all these kids into college who don’t really belong there—whether because they aren’t fit for it or just don’t want to be there—make them waste their time, energy, and money. Then they drop out and feel like failures because they now have no sense of direction (on top of the stigma of being a drop out, and having wasted money)…when they could’ve found fulfillment (and money) if they had started learning a trade earlier on and not wasted their time in college. Furthermore, weeding out the students who really don’t want to or are not fit to be there allows professors to maintain high standards in the classroom (relieving them of the burden of having to function as miracle workers or social workers).

Lastly, this ideology that claims that college ought to be the default option for everyone in order to live an economically stable and existentially meaningful is both unsustainable and morally irresponsible. This narrative belies an elitist, bourgeois (and fairly secularist) worldview.

Happiness does NOT come from upward mobility, social status, financial stability, “independence,” or material comfort. Happiness in life comes from following one’s vocation—one’s calling to love God and neighbor in a specific manner. It comes from local community, family, roots, ethnic traditions, worship, participating in local government and civic institutions, and a sense of responsibility for others. (More on this in our critique of upwardly mobile immigrants who become secular, bourgeois, and assimilated after moving to the suburbs).

For married people, work is primarily a means to support their family, and secondarily a form of personal fulfillment (contributing something to the common good…this is also the issue with the careerist bent of 2nd wave feminism). While a college degree can indeed help you do a better job at your job—and open the door to more lucrative fields of work, it is not merely a job training site, or a dispensary of credentials. It’s place where the sacred act of education—of opening up one’s mind to the universe—takes place. To reduce it to something less than this noble ideal is to render university education something empty and meaningless. No wonder so many students find their college classes to be such a waste of time.

The point is, don’t force your kid to go to college. And don’t shame him if he doesn’t. Just make sure he has a solid plan in place…and that he is discerning his God-given vocation!