“Trust in college is coming back, but it’s conditional,” says Courtney Brown, who studies public opinion about colleges for the Lumina Foundation, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit whose goal is to improve higher education.
“The public has been telling us that cost, flexibility and career relevance shape their view of the value of college,” Brown says. “So people aren’t moving away from education; they’re just becoming more precise about what kind of education they want.”
That could reflect uncertainty in the economy and news about a slowdown in hiring, says Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. He says when job prospects feel shaky and the economy is struggling, people go back to college, especially community colleges.
“If you think about what’s happening lately in the American economy, especially increasing economic uncertainty, this follows that pattern,” he says. “It’s easier to test the waters at a local community college than to necessarily go through the steps of enrolling in a four-year program, especially if a student doesn’t really know what they want to do.”
A large drop in international students at the graduate level
While the number of international students enrolled in undergraduate programs grew this academic year by 3.2%, it was overshadowed by a significant drop at the postgraduate level, of around 10,000 students.
That drop in postgraduate level, mainly in master’s programmes, came after several years of strong growth in which the number of international postgraduate students had increased by around 50%. The slowdown reflects federal policies that limited or disrupted the student visa process and the billions of canceled federal dollars that flowed to research universities, disrupting the process.
Another key finding from the latest enrollment data was a large decline in the number of students studying computer and information sciences. The decline in both graduate and undergraduate programs came after years of steady expansion.
In addition to the consequence of fewer international students, Clearinghouse’s Holsapple explains that the shift away from computer science majors is also influenced by the rise of artificial intelligence.
“Students are seeing the same trends we’re all seeing,” he says. “They see the same news about layoffs in the tech field. They see the rise of AI like we do.”
But these trends encourage it. “Students are making different choices, which I think is really positive for the field and particularly for students because they have those options.”
