“Undergraduate enrollment is projected to decline by 13% in the next 15 years”
It SHOULD be at least 50%, if the government would stop funding useless degrees for women.
There seems to some progress being made in curtailing junk programs. From a Brave search:
“The Department of Education is implementing strict accountability measures to eliminate low-value academic programs, primarily through the Gainful Employment rule and the new Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS). Under these regulations, programs whose graduates fail to outearn high school diploma holders (for undergraduates) or bachelor’s degree holders (for graduates) in two out of three consecutive years lose eligibility for federal student loans and Pell Grants.”
There are no useless degrees. That's not the problem at all.
You send 50%+ of kids to a university system designed for the top 5%, break the system itself because you cannot educate the 50th percentile as you can the 95th, they simply cannot do it, and you sell them all on a fantasy of “you’re an elite now, you deserve a top 10%, probably a top 1% life” that is obviously mathematically impossible.
Overproduction of self-styled elites overstuffed with self importance and crushed under debt is how you stir up an intellectual vanguard and there has never been one so large and so ill informed. never.
They are not even familiar with history or what’s been going on. they have become a set of the blind leading the blind.