Bachelor Degree Aspirants Decline
In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier.
. . . Historically, the prestige of higher education relied on a form of geographic and information monopoly. In 2002, the narrative surrounding a teenager’s future was tightly managed by local gatekeepers—parents, high school guidance counselors, and FCC-regulated television networks that uniformly reinforced the traditional American Dream. If these gatekeepers insisted that a bachelor’s degree was the sole gateway to a middle-class life, a teenager had few tools to verify or challenge that claim. The cultural value of the degree was artificially protected by a lack of visible alternatives.Higher education has been forced to compete in an open attention economy.
Today, those bottlenecks are gone. With teenagers spending an average of eight and a half hours a day consuming decentralized digital media, the local gatekeeper has been entirely bypassed. In this informational vacuum, higher education has been forced to compete in an open attention economy against hyper-charismatic, highly relatable creators who operate with zero institutional overhead.
Nevertheless,
When combining tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation and other expenses, the cost to attend 16 colleges and universities across the nation tops $100,000 per year, according to new data from the Princeton Review.
“We just keep going up and it just never stops,” Jeff Selingo, author of “Dream School,” told CNBC, which reported on the data.
“For the 2026-27 academic year, 16 institutions — including Duke, Georgetown, New York University and University of Chicago — have a sticker price of more than $100,000, according to data exclusively provided to CNBC from The Princeton Review’s upcoming ‘The Best 392 Colleges’ list,'” the outlet reported.
But as I've pointed out here, very few US-born students pay full freight. The real moneymakers are foreign students, who are much more likely to pay the posted price. Except,
The number of newly enrolled international students declined by 17 percent during the recent fall semester, according to the Institute of International Education’s Fall 2025 Snapshot on International Student Enrollment.
This drop has exposed universities’ heavy financial reliance on foreign tuition dollars, according to Shaan Patel, CEO and founder of college admissions company Prep Expert.
Unlike the nearly 40 percent of American students who rely on federal aid to cover higher education expenses, international students do not have access to these benefits and pay their tuition in cash, making them infinitely more attractive to universities, Patel told The College Fix via email.
. . . Schools with larger endowments such as the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, whose student bodies are approximately 20 percent and 40 percent international, respectively, have been able to keep their heads above water financially, even outright refusing federal dollars.
Yet broader structural problems remain. Since 1980, college tuition and fees in the U.S. have increased by 1,200 percent, prompting critics to accuse universities of inflating costs and prioritizing profits over affordability for American families.
Over my working career, I had jobs (especially in government) where a bachelor's degree was an absolute requirement. Most tech-type jobs in private industry, though, had four-year degrees optional. I saw very little difference in interpersonal skills or oveall intelligence among my co-workers in either environment. For that matter, our friends at church have varying educational levels, but judging only from their interpersonal and communication skills, there's no way to tell the difference.The same applies to our neighbors in a very prosperous community -- many have done well at blue-collar jobs in Hollywood, and you can't really distinguish them from others with lofty qualifications.
Another factor is cheating at the college level. I've discussed here how prevalent plagiarism was in freshman composition classes 50 years ago, but apparently with the rise of AI, the problem has only gotten worse. The result is that both students and their parents say that merely paying college tuition and fees should be enough to guarantee status in the upper bourgeoisie, no need to check their work. At best, the univerisites are nervous about this:
Princeton University recently decided to adopt a proposal that would reintroduce proctors to every exam room over AI cheating fears.
The proposal would revise Princeton’s 133-year-old Honor Code, an agreement between students and faculty established in 1893. Previously, students pledged not to take unfair advantage during examinations. In exchange, faculty proctors were not present in the exam rooms.
The proposal cites “the advent of generative artificial intelligence products” as one of the primary concerns which prompted its development. As a result, instructors will “act as additional observers” in the exam room.
The conundrum seems to be, especially with AI, it's difficult to determine whether a submitted piece of work, a paper or an essay exam response, is the result of a student's own mental process or a machine's ability to generate a facsimile of an informed response to any question. But this goes to the problem of the professors, who must themselves work within a closely circmscribed set of views within their subject area -- if they're discouraged from creative thought, how can they recognize it in students?I don't have a whole lot of confidence that this will be solved, especially not by the universities themselves.
