“It’s no secret that college enrollment in the U.S. has dropped, and these declines aren’t slowing down: This fall, college enrollment nationally decreased by nearly another half-million students. These drops are unevenly distributed across race, socioeconomic class and even gender, with recent reports showing that young men are opting out of college at record-setting rates.

While the pandemic accelerated this trend, this crisis has been building for decades. Even as a college degree has increasingly become a prerequisite for stable, living-wage jobs, the cost of college — in both money and time — has become more and more prohibitive. These are fundamental failures; addressing them head-on means questioning some of the very fundamentals of college. 

For example: Why should a college education start at age 18, and only after a student graduates from high school?”

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