America is souring on college, but enrollment is still rising. Why?

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The narrative is by now familiar.

Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen precipitously. More commentators are wondering aloud whether a degree is worth the cost. High school graduates and their families fret about taking on student debt. The Trump administration has aggressively attacked — rhetorically and legally — higher education. Artificial intelligence could threaten the university business model.

And yet, hard data show seemingly positive trends for higher education. 

After a dip during the pandemic, enrollment has risen for three straight years. Elite universities continue to have vastly more applicants than seats. College-educated workers still far out-earn those without a degree, on average. College has actually become somewhat more affordable in recent years.

At Chalkbeat Ideas, we recently held an event trying to understand and untangle these confusing facts. The recording is here; the slides featuring my presentation of data are here. 

“A lot of discouragement of students around higher education has very little to do with education or economic outcomes,” Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University, said during the event.

The discussion helped clarify my own thinking about the paradoxical state of American higher education — and what the prevailing discourse gets wrong. Here are some key takeaways.

In 2023 and 2024, headlines about Americans giving up on the value of college dominated. Ivy League presidents were filleted before Congress over antisemitism on campus. Trump campaigned on reining in elite schools. Support in polls dropped to record lows.

But a funny thing also happened during this time, although it was less noticed: Actual student enrollment started to trend upward again. Now, overall college and university enrollment is above pre-pandemic levels. The negative sentiment around higher education may have deterred at least some students from pursuing a degree, but in recent years there have apparently been other factors pulling them in.

It’s hard to know for sure why confidence in American education has fallen so sharply. But I suspect that a lot of it has to do with attention to the country’s most elite schools, the Ivy League and a handful of others. Those universities, which educate a tiny share of American students, have drawn incredible amounts of attention, largely negative: about their purportedly close-minded liberal culture, their remarkably high tuition rates, and their exclusive admissions practices.

Yet demand to attend these colleges remains strikingly high — they still reject the vast majority of students who apply. In recent years, enrollment has only grown at selective colleges, which remain dominated by students from high-income neighborhoods.

Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, noted archly during the Chalkbeat event that there is little indication of declining interest in college among affluent families, despite suggestions that young people are pivoting to blue-collar work.

“When you look at the wealthiest people in this country … they’re not having conversations about construction trades. They’re not having conversations about HVAC [work] when it comes to their kids,” said Jeffries. KIPP, the country’s largest nonprofit charter network, serving mostly students from low-income families, continues to prioritize access to college, he said.

What drives many people to pursue a degree is economic opportunity. In recent years, a narrative has emerged that pursuing a bachelor’s degree is no longer worth it, due to some combination of higher costs and lower returns. Neither claim is well supported by the data. 

Real college tuition — what people actually pay, rather than the sticker price — has been flat or even falling for nearly two decades, according to tracking from the College Board. Meanwhile, the wage advantage for college graduates has remained at very high levels. 

Rigorous research has typically found that students on the margin of attending college benefit economically from doing so. “Unambiguously, you see large returns to college-going,” said Bleemer. He pointed to studies in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Texas. That doesn’t mean everyone benefits, just that the typical student considering college does, at least where it’s been studied.

The persistent economic value of college may help explain why enrollment at four-year colleges has not responded strongly to the backlash.

Two-year colleges have also seen enrollment rise recently, though this followed years of declines. Between 2010 and 2023, student counts dropped precipitously at places like Wayne County Community College and Central New Mexico Community College, to name a couple. There were also steep declines at for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix Online Campus.

These were hardly the schools at the center of the recent higher education backlash, but they bore the brunt of enrollment declines.

This again may reflect economic fundamentals in which students see less value from certain schools. Rising unemployment rates, which typically make additional education more appealing, have corresponded with the recent uptick in enrollment. 

So if enrollment is growing and the economic case for a degree remains strong, are colleges in a secure spot? Well, no. They face many pressures at the moment. The first is the shrinking pool of potential students. For the foreseeable future, just about every graduating high school class will be smaller than the last, according to projections. Higher education still faces intense political opposition, which could result in less public funding for colleges and universities. Wealthy elite colleges are in many ways best positioned to weather this storm, while lesser-known schools may again be the hardest hit.

The other variable is artificial intelligence. For multiple generations, universities have benefitted from the fact that more-educated workers can often better take advantage of new innovations. This is sometimes called the race between education and technology — in other words, the country has long been racing to get more educated to keep up with evolving tech. 

What’s not clear yet is whether this race will continue. It’s possible that AI could lead to even more demand for higher education, but it could also reduce interest by replacing white-collar work. At the moment, it’s too soon to say how this will play out.

Reach me at [email protected].