Americans don't agree on much these days, but we all seem to agree that higher education in our country is broken. The good news is that we may now see the beginning of a nationwide movement to make higher education a better investment for students and help prepare them for life after school.
Since the 1990s, we have seen an explosion in the cost of college driven by a growth in administrators and virtually endless government-backed debt. Continued increases in enrollments allowed even state schools to create classes and even entire majors for which there was absolutely no job market.
The result is all around us. Millennials and Gen Z are buried in $1.78 trillion in student debt (larger than the economy of Australia or South Korea), and nearly half of college graduates regret their choice of major. There are more college administrators than ever—in fact, at public institutions, there are more administrators than faculty. At Yale, there is roughly one administrator per undergraduate student. It is no wonder that more and more Americans are questioning the old conventional wisdom that college is necessary. Popular respect for college is at an all-time low, and total enrollment at American colleges and universities is down by more than one million students since the Great Recession. President Trump even expressed worry about American colleges going out of business in a recent interview.
Meanwhile, there have been more than seven million jobs available in this country for more than four years straight. The CEO of Ford Motors said recently that he has more than 5,000 job openings that pay six figures—for mechanics. As Marco Rubio famously put it, we need fewer philosophers and more plumbers. There is clearly an enormous misalignment between what colleges are doing and what the job market actually needs.
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