Summary
College enrollment among 18-year-old freshmen fell 5% this fall, with declines most severe at public and private non-profit four-year colleges.
Experts attribute the drop to factors including declining birth rates, high tuition costs, FAFSA delays, and uncertainty over student loan relief after Supreme Court rulings against forgiveness plans.
Economic pressures, such as the need to work, also deter students.
Despite declining enrollment, applications have risen, particularly among low- and middle-income students, underscoring interest in higher education. Experts urge addressing affordability and accessibility to reverse this trend.
We don’t need lots of educated people to make products anyway. Mostly just need one engineer to design something, then a bunch to industrialize it and then a mass of people to man/woman the industrialized system that makes the part…ordering, configuration management, incoming inspection, part distribution, manufacturing (assembly work), packaging, shipping, etc, etc. 1 engineer at the top makes a shit ton of people or can make a shit ton of people have a job. So don’t need a lot of engineers. But it sure would be nice if you had lots of engineers working together. That’s best for having airplanes whose doors don’t pop open via the DFMEA process and other such design tools.
The purpose of education isn’t production. The purpose of education is to learn.
And then do what with it after they “learned” something?
That’s up to them. It’s largely the point. To learn what you want so you can do what you want.