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Contrary to the recession discouraging families from sending their children to college, as some suggested, actually more students are coming to college than ever before. Sara Murray writes in the Wall Street Journal that:
The share of new high-school graduates enrolled in college reached a record high last year, likely reflecting the weak job market they faced.
Some 70.1% of the 2.9 million new graduates between the ages of 16 and 24 headed to colleges and universities, the Labor Department said Tuesday, based on data from January through October 2009. That percentage was a historical high for the data series, which began in 1959.
Apparently recent high school graduates went to college in 2009 in significant numbers because they couldn’t find jobs. It’s always a little difficult for people with no training beyond high school to secure employment. It’s apparently become nearly impossible during this recession.
College enrollment numbers have been rising for years but, according to the Murray article, “the poor economy, which has created a particularly tough labor market for young and uneducated workers, is amplifying the trend.”
For many it looks like college is a way to stave off unemployment. The tough part comes in figuring out what to do when college is over.
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PQuincy on April 29, 2010 11:11 PM:
True enough: what are we 'teaching' them for, if their future is to be BA-holding service industry employee, one might ask.
Then again: by going to college rather than looking for (non-existent) jobs, these new freshmen are not only helping the job market (by staying off it, full time, for a few years). They're also giving us profs a chance to make them better thinkers, more knowledgeable about things they might learn to care about, and better citizens once they DO go back into the job market.
Their path won't be easy, and our generation has certainly not been fair to this generation of college students -- but they're as smart and as hopeful and as promising as every generation, and I doubt very many of them will be harmed by the year or four they spend, and quite a few improved in one way or another. A service-industry employee who knows something about the poetry written during the English Revolution, or can reflect on organic molecule synthesis, or knows about the normal curve, may not earn more (the false standard that college administrations have been reduced to trying to sell), but they might be better human beings.