Economic and cultural gaps are not narrowing

Here is the lead from a story on college enrollment declines from today's Washington Post:

A year after the coronavirus pandemic hammered undergraduate enrollment, many colleges and universities are still reporting a decline in people pursuing degrees this semester, especially schools serving large populations of low-income students.

A snapshot of fall head counts released Tuesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows undergraduate enrollment down 3.2 percent since fall 2020, largely mirroring last fall’s drop of 3.5 percent. The data capture head counts through Sept. 23 at half of the institutions that report to the Clearinghouse, roughly 1,800 schools, and are a closely watched indicator of sector-wide trends.

Continued erosion of enrollment could have significant impacts on college completion rates in the coming years and raises questions about the economic trajectory of a generation of students. Some higher education experts had hoped last year’s dire enrollment data reflected a temporary blip, but the enduring trend has some worried about whether the most vulnerable students will return to the educational pipeline.

I am interested in this report partially because I teach a couple online college writing courses and fewer students eventually means fewer teaching positions. I also have a granddaughter who will be entering college in the fall of 2023, which is not all that far away.

I also found some of the writing choices the reporter made to be worth a comment or two. For instance, that very first dependent clause, which provided context prior to the actual news, might work quite nicely tacked on to the end of the graf. 

Many colleges and universities are still reporting a decline in people pursuing degrees this semester, especially schools serving large populations of low-income students, a year after the coronavirus pandemic hammered undergraduate enrollment.

The independent clause always contains the subject and verb for a sentence, and the dependent clause is properly separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma. When I flipped the order of this sentence, what stood out was how vague that first sentence is. Any story that begins with "many" is in danger of estimating and summarizing over sharing hard facts, and what the word "decline" means is anyone's guess. A one percent decline is certainly not in the same league as a ten percent decline, for instance.

Bottom line: it's not a great opening to the report, needing more specifics.

Readers might want to push on, if only to find out more about schools serving low-income students. If that is a trend, the chasm between the college-educated and everyone else can only widen. And THAT seems like a depressing trend when our economy is struggling to find workers for ever more complex positions.

Falling college enrollment need not be a horrible thing, of course, if young people have options to enroll in less-traditional higher education, in career training schools, in apprenticeship programs, etc.

But as long as the extraordinary gap between what college grads earn and non-college grads earn, we will remain stuck in not only our urban-rural splits but in our education level splits. One reason many in our country and world seem to hate one another is lack of knowledge and lack of shared experiences.

We are a nation in need of some new strategies.