One surprising trend that’s come out of the higher education demographics: white college-age Americans are ditching school. Katherine Mangan, senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why white student enrollment has been declining for years, why administrators are just now catching on to this fact, and the delicate balance of recruiting underrepresented groups while maintaining a baseline of traditional students. Her article is “Where Are the White Students?”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] For decades now, education advocates have tracked college enrollment rates for black and Latino students and first generation children of immigrants that focus on students from underrepresented backgrounds was meant as a correction to the era when people of color were not always welcome on college rolls. But a recent demographic shift at schools presents a different kind of enrollment problem. These days, white student enrollments are falling three times faster than the national average. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Chris Boyd. This phenomenon started before the pandemic, but has grown markedly since that time. And now both two and four year institutions are trying to navigate the financial fallout while asking uncomfortable questions about whether it’s appropriate to more actively recruit white students who for a long time were vastly overrepresented. Katherine Mangan is senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, which published her article. “Where are the White students?” Katherine, welcome to Think.
Katherine Mangan [00:01:00] Hi, Krys. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Krys Boyd [00:01:02] So the pandemic year may have been an aberration, but overall decline in college enrollments started before then. They have continued since everything open back up. What are some of the broad reasons for this trend among all students?
Katherine Mangan [00:01:17] Among all students, we’re definitely finding that ever since the Great Recession, there’s been a downturn in college enrollment. And part of it is just the fact that demographic trends there have been declining birth rates, there are fewer students graduating from high school who are potentially ready to enter colleges. But also, there’s just a feeling that some for a lot of students, there’s a questioning of whether college is worth the time and expense of of a four year degree.
Krys Boyd [00:01:52] I gather demand is as high as ever for admission to highly elite schools. But those institutions, we should point out, only educate a small sliver of the population. Right?
Katherine Mangan [00:02:03] Yeah, that’s definitely true. I mean, the vast majority of colleges accept probably three quarters or more of their students. And so they’re probably going to be particularly hard hit because they don’t have as deep a pool to draw into. When you see enrollments declining across the board.
Krys Boyd [00:02:21] Why did this trend, the faster drop among white students, take demographers by surprise?
Katherine Mangan [00:02:28] Well, it started out by taking them by surprise. It took us by surprise. The article that I wrote stems from a couple of conversations that I had with my editor, Darrell Burnett. We were looking at the very significant declines, particularly in black enrollment and coming out of the pandemic. In looking at some comparative data, we wanted to see how does that compare with enrollments among white students. And we were really surprised to see that the declines among white students were significantly steeper than those among black students and that this had gone back for a decade or so. You know, I think it caught a lot of people by surprise because especially in the past several years, a lot of us have been focusing very much on the impact of the pandemic on populations that were particularly hard hit and those of the minority populations. There’s also been a lot of focus since 2020 on racial equity. And so there’s been a tendency to focus on students who are underrepresented in higher education and not those who tend to be overrepresented, which is your white students?
Krys Boyd [00:03:43] Yeah. It’s so interesting that you went looking for one story and then found another one that also bears reporting about.
Katherine Mangan [00:03:52] Yeah, that’s really true. And we weren’t quite sure what to do with this. Daryl and I talked about it and these numbers kept coming up. They were sort of counterintuitive. We kept expecting that the enrollment slides would be highest among blacks and black students, and that just wasn’t the case. So I reached out to some demographer, some researchers, and was surprised to find that even among the demographers who have been tracking these numbers for decades, it kind of snuck up on them, too, because to them, to the focus really coming out of the pandemic had been a why are we seeing these severe declines among black students and what can we do to turn these around? They weren’t necessarily looking at enrollment trends among white students.
Krys Boyd [00:04:38] Katherine, I get that the decline in white students is definitely a thing. Could any of it, though, be accounted for by the fact that the U.S. population is much less overwhelmingly white than it once was?
Katherine Mangan [00:04:51] Yes, that’s definitely a factor. And that was my first response when Darrell and I were talking about this. I thought, well, maybe this is just a matter of demographics. The white enrollments or the fertility rates, particularly among whites, white women are dropping at faster rates. But what I found from talking to the demographers and researchers who have started looking into this was that there are such a precipitous decline in white enrollment that it went well beyond what could be explained simply by demographics.
Krys Boyd [00:05:22] What about the broader availability of claiming multiple identities? Could white students be disappearing from enrollments in part because people of mixed heritage who might have identified as just white a generation ago now claim a different demographic category?
Katherine Mangan [00:05:35] That’s a very interesting point that you raised. Again, that’s also very possible that that might have something to do with that. And also, Doug Shapiro from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, who is one of the nation’s leading experts on these trends, pointed out that a lot of students, for whatever reasons and we don’t really know why, are not are checking the box, you know, that they don’t want to identify what their race is. And so there are a lot of people of unknown race and we just don’t know how many of those might be white students who, for whatever reason, are not checking that box.
Krys Boyd [00:06:11] There is also the reality that white students were almost certainly overrepresented in the enrollment figures at many, many schools in the past. Is this trend, do you think, more than just a correction to student bodies that now more closely resemble the U.S. population overall?
Katherine Mangan [00:06:30] I think that’s that’s very possible. And I think there are some people who might look at these numbers and say, well, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. White students have been overrepresented for four decades. Maybe this is a good thing. The you know, the colleges are becoming even more diverse and coming closer to representing the populations that they serve. But I think most people would like to achieve that kind of balance by adding students and not by subtracting them, not by losing white students, but by continuing to encourage and enroll more students of color.
Krys Boyd [00:07:06] So you found that enrollments of black and Latino students have also fallen, but it’s smaller rates relative to the overall populations of those students.
Katherine Mangan [00:07:16] Yeah, well, one of the things that we found, we have a data expert on our staff, and Brian O’Leary looked at the numbers. He went back from to 2012 because we wanted to get sort of a big picture look at this. And he found that plate undergraduate enrollment fell by 22%. And this is across all sectors of higher education, public private, two year, four year. And black enrollment was down 19%. Well, the difference between 22 and 19% might not sound like that much. But when you consider that white students are overwhelmingly the biggest demographic in colleges, you know, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of white students who are, for whatever reason, turning away from college. So black enrollment was down 19%. Asian enrollment was up 2% and Hispanic enrollment surged by 31%. So here during this decade long time period, you have white enrollment down 20%, 22%, Hispanic enrollment up 31%. So, again, you know, this is the demographic forces at work, too.
Krys Boyd [00:08:27] So let’s talk about some of the reasons white students specifically may not be choosing to pursue college. What are some of the social and political forces that could be influencing that?
Katherine Mangan [00:08:39] Well, one of the reasons that a lot of people are turning away from college and and again, you know, so much of this is speculation because there hasn’t been a lot of study into particularly into the enrollment declines among white students. There’s been so much research about the obstacles and barriers that have caused enrollments among black students to decline, but very little on white student declines. So, you know, a lot of this is speculation, but definitely a lot of students are finding that when there’s there are a lot of job opportunities that don’t require a college degree, as is the case now, there are a lot of jobs that students can get with a high school degree that will allow them to make at least a reasonable, minimum, reasonable middle class wage. So some students are just deciding that because college is expensive. Tuition is going up. They’re just going to take a job where they can start earning money right away and not take on college debt.
Krys Boyd [00:09:44] Why are many influential conservatives convinced or many conservatives have convinced college is a place where students might be somehow indoctrinated by progressives?
Katherine Mangan [00:09:54] That’s definitely a message that a lot of students are getting, particularly in states like Texas and Florida, where the messaging from conservative politicians has been that it’s just not worth your time. You’re going to go to college and these liberal professors are going to try to indoctrinate you in their beliefs. It’s the message that a lot of students are getting is that colleges are focused too heavily on the needs of minority students and that white students needs are not being met. It’s unclear how much of that is actually influencing students decisions, but to the extent that they are influencing at least some students and some families, it’s probably going to be more likely students who are white simply because of the demographics of the major political parties. Republicans are overwhelmingly white. The messages that conservatives are putting out about higher education are more likely to land and make sense to to white students.
Krys Boyd [00:11:03] Is there evidence, to be fair, that people with college degrees, for whatever reason, are more likely to align with the left than those without?
Katherine Mangan [00:11:12] Yes. Well, I think if you look at the recent election, the most recent presidential election, there’s no question the college educated voters were more inclined to vote Democratic. And that has been the case for quite a while. So, yeah, so I think there’s there’s definitely a lot a lot of evidence that college educated families are more likely to vote Democratic and probably be less receptive to this message that college is a waste of time and money.
Krys Boyd [00:11:40] What we don’t know. It’s kind of a causal correlative question here, right? We don’t know whether college makes people more progressive, whether more progressive people are inclined to want to go to college. Those things have not been entirely teased out by statisticians. Is that right?
Katherine Mangan [00:11:58] That’s correct.
Krys Boyd [00:11:59] So are the changes in enrollment white enrollment more concentrated among those who hold conservative views to begin with? You know that. Or has anyone looked at it?
Katherine Mangan [00:12:12] If anyone has looked at it, we haven’t found them. And we would love to hear from someone who is looking into this. Because, you know, again, when I reached out to researchers, I was having a lot of trouble finding people who had been sort of digging into this, looking because I think there’s a lot of important research to be done about who are these students who are turning away from college. It’s definitely the case that it’s increasingly white students. That’s a trend that, as you mentioned in your introduction, is just accelerating. The gap has been accelerating since 2018. And even in the most recent statistics that we got from the National Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollments were up slightly across the board for every category except for white students, it was down and for freshman enrollment, white enrollment was down by about twice as much as black enrollment. So this is a trend that’s just continuing to happen. And I think colleges just they need to find out why students are turning away. Is that antagonism toward college or is it simply apathy? And which are the students who are deciding against college and how can we bring them back? How can we convince them that a four year or even a two year degree is worth it? Because again, when I first saw these statistics and my editor and I started talking about them, I thought, well, maybe students should stop going to four year colleges. Maybe a lot of white students are deciding to go to a community college or start out at a community college. But then we dug into the numbers and saw, whoa, you know, the the declines are much greater at community colleges where enrollments down by 34%. But for white students, it’s down 44%.
Krys Boyd [00:14:05] Katherine, how do the rising costs of a college education factor into this trend of falling enrollments overall across many demographic categories?
Katherine Mangan [00:14:15] I think there’s no question that students and their families are very concerned about the rising costs of college. I don’t think people necessarily have a realistic, realistic understanding, though, of what college is likely to cost them. I think there are a lot of low income students who don’t realize the amount of financial aid that they can get. The fact that community colleges in some states are free, I think there is definitely a narrative that college costs are exploding, that it’s just not worth it. And, you know, again, to some extent, in some cases it’s true that college is very, very expensive and many call it many students do end up having to take on a significant amount of debt. But there’s also a lot of financial aid available for people who won’t even find out about it if they’ve already made up their minds that they’re not going to go to college.
Krys Boyd [00:15:15] What alternatives are students pursuing who might have been academically qualified to succeed in college but decide not to go? Like our numbers at trade schools rising among white students and other students.
Katherine Mangan [00:15:26] Numbers of trade schools are rising, and there’s definitely been a push toward more programs that emphasize work skills. And that’s something that, interestingly, we’ve found the Democratic Party has also embraced the idea. And Kamala Harris mentioned this during her campaign, that a four year degree isn’t necessarily right for everybody, that there are there should be other ways to enter comfortable middle class or to achieve comfortable middle class lifestyles through trade schools, through apprenticeships, through other workforce training opportunities. And when I wrote my article, I spoke to some students who had made that decision for themselves in high school. Like, I can start making money right away. I don’t have to take on college debt. I can become an electrician. I can become a welder or I can become a coder. I mean, there are also a lot of other new opportunities for students who want to bypass the traditional college by going to coding bootcamp or or a trade school.
Krys Boyd [00:16:37] When you mentioned students starting to think about this earlier in high school, these are not necessarily last minute decisions by students not to go to college. What changes did you hear about in the rates of students taking college credit courses, things like AP and IB classes during high school?
Katherine Mangan [00:16:55] Well, one of the things that kind of surprised me was community college enrollments have been way down, and the only thing that’s kept them from dropping further is that there have been so many students who are opting to take what they call dual credit classes where you get. Get college credit as well as high school credit. That’s been a huge trend and those numbers are growing dramatically. But again, what was so surprising to me was that among white students, they the numbers are actually down, that there are a lot more and more students now taking these classes for college credit and fewer white students. Again, just one of those confounding statistics that we don’t really quite know what to make of.
Krys Boyd [00:17:38] How do the enrollment changes for white students at private schools compare with enrollments at state run colleges or community colleges?
Katherine Mangan [00:17:46] I have not broken down the numbers by private colleges, but I do know that the declines and these trends that we’re talking about cut across all different sectors. So certainly the declines in private, we’re seeing the same declines in white enrollment in private colleges that we’re seeing in public colleges, too.
Krys Boyd [00:18:05] Is there any significant gender difference, like our white young men and white young women skipping out on college now at similar rates?
Katherine Mangan [00:18:14] That’s another really important question. And one of the first questions I had when I spoke with my editor, I said, you know, we’ve heard so much about the crisis of men not enrolling in colleges. I mean, a lot of colleges have like two thirds of their student body are women. We knew that in many cases the numbers are down for men. But again, surprisingly, the numbers that we found and also that national demographers have found, is that these the rates of decline are almost as great among women as they are among men. There isn’t a huge gender difference. Of course, that’s in a few states. That’s different, like in Utah. I did find that in that particular state, it the declines were specifically white men. And the commissioner there said, we’re losing white men. We need to find out why. So in that case, it really was a different scenario.
Krys Boyd [00:19:09] You mentioned your editor a couple of times. I imagine there were a lot of conversations before this story was published. Kathryn, it feels like a delicate question, but one worth asking. Given the historic underrepresentation of students of color at many schools, which implies a historic overrepresentation of white students. Is it, like, unseemly to worry about not enough white students choosing college?
Katherine Mangan [00:19:35] That’s exactly the conversation that Darrell and I had. We just kind of wondered, what are people going to do with this data and how are they going to interpret it? Are some people going to look at these numbers and say, well, white enrollments are down because colleges have been focused too much on the needs of minority students. They’re spending too much time trying to mine or recruit minority students. Or, you know, is this going to play into the narrative that many conservatives have put out that colleges are not welcoming to white students? Are colleges chasing students away by policies that focus on the needs of underrepresented students? So it it is sensitive because, you know, I don’t think that that’s the case. And I don’t think that those factors are are necessarily important indicators. But at the same time, when these conversations first came up, it was at a time when the Supreme Court had just overturned the use of affirmative action in admissions. It was at a time when there was a lot of discussion about police brutality toward black citizens. It just seemed like an uncomfortable time to even be raising the question of where are the white students going?
Krys Boyd [00:20:53] What effect do falling enrollments have on higher education institutions themselves?
Katherine Mangan [00:20:58] It’s having a very severe impact and is is expected to continue to to hurt them because many, many colleges are highly tuition dependent. And when you see these kinds of numbers that we’re seeing, enrollments have been falling for well over a decade and they’re expected to continue falling well into the next decade. You know, there’s this looming enrollment cliff that people talk about that we haven’t even quite reached. And so tuition revenue is going to continue to take a big hit. And, you know, colleges are undoubtedly going to close as a result of this.
Krys Boyd [00:21:35] So let’s talk about that enrollment cliff. After 2037, I think it is, demographers believe we will just see smaller overall numbers of high school graduates each year just based on birth rates and immigration trends and that sort of thing.
Katherine Mangan [00:21:50] Yes, that’s right. The the cliff that they talk about is really supposed to start right around next year, but continue through about 2027. And again, the declines are going to be much sharper among white students than other demographics. So this is just expected to accelerate the trends that we’re seeing now. And, of course, white students are still the the the top just numerically the number one demographic that colleges draw on and have always been able to count on on drawing. So when you see these kinds of enrollments in the top demographic colleges have always drawn from and relied on. That’s very troubling.
Krys Boyd [00:22:37] Yeah, I mean, it’s safe to say, as you’ve mentioned, many schools in recent years have worked hard to recruit students from diverse demographic backgrounds, even in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in college admissions. Some schools continue to make a concerted effort to draw black and Latino students to at least, you know, apply for admission. Is it possible they just haven’t paid enough attention to also recruiting white students Like have colleges and universities taken white students interest in college for granted?
Katherine Mangan [00:23:09] That’s a very good question, and I don’t know the answer to it, but I imagine that there are a lot of colleges that are doing soul searching now and trying to consider whether that might be the case. I, I did speak to people in college admissions who said that they are having to make a much more concerted effort to find out why many of the families that normally would have sent their kids to college, why they’re not doing that. And, you know, if it’s a case where more students are saying, I want something that’s going to directly apply to a job, I want to be able to know that I can get a job when I get out. The colleges are going to have to. Repackage some of their programs, perhaps make more programs more closely connected to the workforce. I think they’re just having to look at a number of ways that they can continue to reach out to segments of the population that, again, they may have always taken for granted.
Krys Boyd [00:24:12] It also speaks to the ways that we’ve redefined the purpose of college over time. Like almost no family is now sending a student on for higher education simply to kind of round out what they know about the world. The idea is that we invest in college because we want our kids to be able to get certain kinds of jobs.
Katherine Mangan [00:24:33] Yeah, there’s no question that it’s become much more tied to. The importance that many families see in being able to get a job as soon as you get out as quickly as possible. But it’s one of the things that really interested us too, was just that this sort of growing skepticism in the value of higher education. It doesn’t cut across all demographics equally, at least in that the public perception project that we did a year ago, we put out a survey and we found, again, somewhat surprisingly, that black families were much less skeptical. They were much more likely by about a 20% difference to say that college colleges are useful, that they that a college degree is important. White students, white families were more skeptical. And, you know, one of the things one of the questions I had was to maybe a lot of the efforts that are under attack right now. Maybe to some extent they’ve been successful because students from underrepresented backgrounds are getting the message that college is important. This is something you need to consider. They’re more likely to take these dual credit classes. And today, like even this year, this year, the enrollment statistics show that the declines among minority students are stabilizing while they’re continuing to drop for white students. So maybe the message is getting out to minority students that this is something worth worth investing in.
Krys Boyd [00:26:15] Katherine. As far as schools told you, is the loss of larger numbers of white students more significant somehow for schools bottom lines than the loss of students from other groups?
Katherine Mangan [00:26:26] Yes, it definitely is, largely because white students are so, again, just the number one demographic. Colleges have to realize that the number of white students that they typically draw is so much higher than the number of. Minority students. And so when they lose X percentage of their white students, again, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of students.
Krys Boyd [00:26:54] So, obviously, you know, you mentioned that some schools may well have to close within a few years, but many others are trying to do whatever they can to stay operational. What are colleges doing to shore up budget gaps if they have fewer students and presumably less tuition revenue coming in?
Katherine Mangan [00:27:13] Well, unfortunately, some colleges are having to make the decision to cut programs. You know, in Pennsylvania, we’re seeing a number of colleges consolidating colleges in West Virginia, cutting programs. So there are definitely cuts happening across the board. But at the same time, I think colleges are trying very, very hard. In some cases, they’re reaching out to students who started college and then dropped out trying to convince them that it’s time for them to come back. And so there’s been a big push there. There are also colleges that are banding together to try to reach out to students in rural areas. And rural areas tend to be predominantly that there are more white people living in rural areas. And so that’s another place where many colleges are realizing they have to spend more time focusing on them.
Krys Boyd [00:28:08] So to that point, I mean, if schools were to choose to do something like targeted white recruitment, which again feels a little weird, what would that even look like? I mean, beyond like looking to geographic areas where there may be higher concentrations of white students deciding whether or not they want to go to college, how how is white recruitment different?
Katherine Mangan [00:28:31] Again, that’s a very good question. Very sensitive area. I don’t know how they would do that, and I don’t think anyone would really look at it necessarily in those terms. I think. I think they would probably want to find out, just do a lot more sort of digging in and doing surveys and finding out why students or why students and their families are deciding not to come to college and then trying to change their curricula, change their approach to meet those unmet needs. And again, I think one of the major areas is probably, you know, these kids who might have said, I’m just going to go to coding camp. I don’t need to take on in a four year degree. Well, maybe colleges can integrate coding or tech skills more closely into that across their curriculum and be able to make the case that from day one, from your freshman year, we’re giving you job skills. We’re setting you up with internships. We’re making sure that you’re getting that work experience that you say you need and that you want right from the get go.
Krys Boyd [00:29:33] Is anybody talking about experimenting with fast tracking degree programs? I think in parts of Europe it’s it’s typical to earn the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in three years rather than four.
Katherine Mangan [00:29:46] Yeah, we’re definitely hearing some of that. And we’re also hearing for graduate education making it faster to earn earn an M.D.. I mean, both the business and medical schools are looking at ways to fast track. And I think at the undergraduate level, too, there’s more talk about getting students through in three years rather than four.
Krys Boyd [00:30:10] I mean, that would be a huge cost savings for most students. You know, not paying room and board for that final year, not paying for classes.
Katherine Mangan [00:30:18] It would be an another big cost savings, too, is for students to spend the first couple of years at a community college and then transfer to a four year college. So I think one of the things that colleges are really focusing on is trying to streamline that process of transferring from community colleges to two four year colleges because it’s notoriously difficult. And so many students start out thinking, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to save a lot of money, go to a community college for two years and transfer. And they go to transfer and they find that like half their credits aren’t transferring over and they feel like they have to start over. So one of the ways the colleges are really trying to make this a more streamlined, efficient and less expensive process for students is by streamlining that process of transfer from 2 to 4 year colleges.
Krys Boyd [00:31:05] Katherine, it is possible some of these students are just choosing not to go to college now. Perhaps they will feel more inclined or more ready later on. What does Angela Otto’s story?
Katherine Mangan [00:31:18] Angela Otto is one of the students I talked to who started out in a technical college. She wasn’t crazy about going to college in the first place, but she said in her high school, everyone, I was told, you know, this is what you have to do to get ahead. So she enrolled in a technical college where she thought, you know, she’d feel relatively comfortable and she hated it. So she got in a camper van with her boyfriend headed across the country and ended up in Bend, Oregon, where she joined a workforce training program. Her real interest was in environmental sustainability, and she had taken some courses that didn’t really do that much for her. But when she got into this workforce training program, she, you know, as I said in the article, she kind of traded in her laptop for a chainsaw and an ax, and she learned how to clear forests, how to clear trails and do a lot of work in the field that she said, you know, experience as she said she never would have gotten in the classroom. So she’s someone who is very gung ho about this as an alternative. But she also admitted that she wasn’t making a lot of money, that, yes, she saved a lot on college tuition, but she was just barely getting by. And so when I talked to her, she was back thinking maybe ultimately to move ahead, I really will need to get a college degree. And what does that look like for me right now? Because I’ve just never thought of myself as college material.
Krys Boyd [00:32:41] Did you speak to educators or have you spoken, working on other pieces about this trend? I mean, I would imagine it’s pretty devastating for a lot of high school teachers to see shrinking numbers of students thinking that they want to even apply to college.
Katherine Mangan [00:32:57] Yeah, I think it is. And I think in Angela’s case, she said that her her homeroom teacher had been so determined to encourage every student in her class to go on to college that she said, we’re going to put your resumes or your all of your numbers, all of your test scores that everything into a computer program. And it’s going to spit out a list of colleges like these are the colleges that are right for you. And it was an effort to try to show students that, yes, college is possible. It’s the way to get ahead. And I think it’s hard for them to see students deciding that, well, no, maybe it’s not right for me. But again, you know, there’s a big question about how much of this is students thinking being actually antagonistic toward the idea of college and how much of it is just apathy, Students just thinking, you know, just not thinking. It makes a lot of sense for them right now.
Krys Boyd [00:33:52] Did you hear anybody talking about burnout as a factor in all this?
Katherine Mangan [00:33:58] Yeah, I think that’s definitely a factor. I’m glad you raised. Especially coming through Covid, there were so many students who just really got burned out on education in general. They were kind of disillusioned because what they were learning sort of sitting at home in their apartments, staring at a screen wasn’t all that stimulating. Students. A lot of them were falling behind, too. And so I think that’s no doubt had an impact on the number of students who were really excited about the idea of continuing education for some of them was like, you know, enough, you know, I just want to get out and start making money.
Krys Boyd [00:34:35] So I suppose for as long as I’ve been paying attention to these issues, there’s always been great encouragement in high schools for as many students as possible to prepare themselves for college, whether or not they end up going. There’s also been this acknowledgment, you know, that college is not for everybody, which I think has always been true, but has sometimes smacked of a kind of patronizing like, well, maybe, maybe you’re not college material. Is this just starting to be something that students are realizing? Maybe college isn’t for everybody and is not necessary for everybody?
Katherine Mangan [00:35:09] I think there’s definitely a growing sentiment among many students that that’s the case. But I think it’s also important to consider when we talk about college, very often we’re talking about four year college. And of course, college also includes two year colleges. A college can include trades. So when someone says, you know, I’m not college material, they may be thinking in terms of four year colleges, but there may be a very attractive two year option that makes a lot of sense for them, that can get them into the workforce quickly without taking on a lot of debt. But I also think there is a feeling among many conservative families that a lot of people have looked down on people without college degrees and thought that there are somehow lesser than because they chose not to go to a college or go to a four year college. And again, that’s something that I’m seeing. Both the Democrat, Democrats and Republicans are really making the point that there are should be so many different options, two year, four year trade schools, apprenticeships, that there are so many ways that are very valid, very important ways for students to get the training and the preparation they need.
Krys Boyd [00:36:28] To return again to the financial aspects of this. Even the most affordable schools are typically a significant investment for students and their families. Are white students somehow just growing more skeptical that the money they put into earning a degree will pay off in the end?
Katherine Mangan [00:36:48] Good question. Our Public Perceptions Project survey, I think, would would tend to hint that that’s the case, that white families are more skeptical about whether college will pay off. But one of the surprising findings to me is that it’s not necessarily low income white students because I had readers writing me saying, well, isn’t this just a matter of of income levels? Isn’t this more just that low income students, whether they’re white, whether they’re black, they’re less likely to want to go to college. And surprisingly enough, what we found in the latest enrollment data is that it’s the white students from upper and middle incomes that are turning away from college at higher numbers. Why that is, you know, we really don’t know. And again, that’s just something that we’re continuing to dig into and hope researchers out there are also looking at.
Krys Boyd [00:37:43] You also wanted to explore why students of color might be making different calculations on this question. What did you hear about why some students of color continue to feel like college is their their best shot at having a lucrative career?
Katherine Mangan [00:38:00] I spoke with one researcher who said she felt that there were black families who felt that in order to get the same job, they have to be even better educated that they couldn’t necessarily take for granted that coming out of high school, their kids could get a good job. There’s a study from the Georgetown University Center on Workforce and Education that showed that in rural areas, which of course tend to be, you know, more predominantly white in rural areas, it’s the white people who are taking these jobs that are making better wages than black people taking comparable jobs. So a lot of these. Options that are available to high school graduates in rural areas are more appealing to white students because they can count on being able to earn higher incomes than people than black people taking the same jobs.
Krys Boyd [00:39:01] Well, what about this phenomenon known as the college wealth premium by which Americans who hold college degrees historically have been able to expect to earn significantly more, maybe not early in their working lives, but over the course of their working lives than those who don’t. Is a degree still a hedge against financial hardships later on?
Katherine Mangan [00:39:23] Again, you’ll hear. Depends on who you talk to. That’s always been the argument. And it’s a very valid argument that over the course of a person’s lifetime, if you have a four year college degree or a college degree in general, you’re going to earn significantly more money, probably be healthier. There’s just a lot of very positive benefits that come in the long term from having a college degree. But when you take into consideration the debt that students are taking on and take both of those factors into consideration, not only the sort of pluses, but the minuses, you know, there are people who feel like this gap is is narrowing and that it’s not as clear as it used to be that a college degree is worth it in the long run. And again, you’ll find conflicting stories that say yes, when you take all of these things into consideration still over the course of a lifetime, there’s no question that students who have a college degree are going to end up ahead, at least financially.
Krys Boyd [00:40:23] So I’ll I’ll stipulate that I’m a believer in the value of education, but I can understand why people are convinced by the arguments that say, like, you can spend $200,000 or more on a college education or you can give your child that money to start a business or something that may or may not succeed. But but college may or may not, you know, be something that they graduate from. I mean, it’s it it has started to become so much money that one has to question whether there are better uses for that money.
Katherine Mangan [00:40:56] You know, Krys, you raised a really interesting issue that the idea that a family could give their child money to start a business again, that’s something that people with with money are more likely to be able to do. And that could partly explain why these enrollment declines among white students. The skepticism is highest among people in these higher income brackets because their students know, like if I don’t go to college, I’m probably not going to fall into poverty. My parents might be able to help, you know, help me start a business. I could take a gap year. I could just sort of take some time to figure things out. This is a luxury that some people have that others don’t have. And that could explain, you know, perhaps why some of the skepticism is really among people who are better off financially that they can afford to be.
Krys Boyd [00:41:43] You found, Kathryn, some white influencers deliberately creating content, preaching against college to high school students. What sort of case are these folks making against college?
Katherine Mangan [00:41:57] Yeah. Again, in an effort to reach out to students, a bunch of different students to get different ideas of why they weren’t going to college. I spoke to one young woman who started out at Texas Tech University. She was an engineering and math major, and she said she was pretty close to graduating. She ended up dropping out and becoming one of these influencers who goes around the country telling students why college is a mistake. And the reason is that she, as a conservative Christian, felt that even in a place like Texas Tech, which is not exactly a hotbed of liberalism, she felt that she was being pressured to suppress her own beliefs, that she wore a MAGA hat and got a lot of grief for it. She says she was forced to take a course. Well, she wasn’t forced to take a course, but there’s a divisional requirement that she ended up somehow on a course on gender studies that just really frustrated her because, you know, she didn’t feel like she was able to express her views without, you know, being being looked down upon. So she dropped out. She’s one of these people who is going around with a group called Turning Point USA and telling students that, you know, college makes sense for some people. I wanted to be an engineer originally. And if you want to be an engineer, you need to go to college. But if you don’t, if there are alternatives, you might want to think about it because, you know, as she is telling people and as a lot of young conservative people are telling people, colleges may not be as welcoming to students from conservative backgrounds, You may you may not get what you’re looking for and you may feel a lot of pressure that you, you know, perhaps won’t get if you can find an alternative to college.
Krys Boyd [00:43:44] There is, of course, a difference between hearing and listening. Surely many college administrators are hearing a lot of people like this young woman. Are they taking it to heart? Are they are they paying attention and trying to sort of understand what it is that some students are pushing back against?
Katherine Mangan [00:44:04] I think they are. And I think that, you know, I’ve written a lot about all of the pushback against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. And I think that in those spaces, people are trying to sort of clear up misconceptions that people have about the idea that these are these massive bureaucracies that are just going out and recruiting minority people and being somehow hostile to white people, making them feel guilty about their race. I think the people who work in Dei offices, the ones that are left, are trying to clear up misconceptions about what it is they’re doing and to try to push back against this narrative that colleges are hostile to conservative students and won’t welcome them.
Krys Boyd [00:44:53] Is this, for now, mostly a U.S. trend? Or are college enrollments declining around the globe?
Katherine Mangan [00:45:01] I have not looked beyond our borders, but I suspect that they are declining. I really can’t answer that, though, because my focus has really been in this country.
Krys Boyd [00:45:12] Well, there’s no question this country will have to figure out a way to move forward.
Katherine Mangan [00:45:17] Definitely.
Krys Boyd [00:45:18] Katherine Mangan is senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, which published her article. “Where are the White Students?” Katherine, this has been really interesting. Thank you for making time to talk.
Katherine Mangan [00:45:29] Thank you so much, Krys. I enjoyed talking with you and really appreciate the invitation.
Krys Boyd [00:45:33] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast for free. Wherever you like to get podcasts. To find it, just search for KERA Think our website is think.kera.org. Go there to find out about upcoming shows and to sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
