Recent numbers confirm Conley’s dire prediction from 2019. As of this fall, the total number of enrolled undergraduates in the country is down almost 10 percent, which amounts to almost a million and a half fewer college students in the past two years alone.

But at the same time enrollment in four-year institutions is falling, two-year colleges and skilled trade programs are experiencing growth. Evidence suggests that potential students and their parents are working carefully through the math, comparing the cost of education to the eventual pay rates of graduates. Many are changing course on where to invest their education dollars.

The economics are certainly a big part of what is going on. When a commodity becomes so expensive and its perceived value drops so low, a downturn in consumption is expectable. Economics is not everything, however. Unexplored in the Chronicle’s investigation of this matter is the way the culture of higher education has operated to undermine its own continuing existence.

The unrelentingly, radicalizing social-justice spirit of contemporary higher education includes open denunciation of people at the higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum. They have long made up the lion’s share of families paying full tuition, shouldering a disproportionate part of the work of making higher education economically feasible.

(via NRO)