It’s been a bear of a week for the UMaine System.
Despite weighing “serious missteps and lack of effective communication and engagement,” its board of trustees voted Monday to extend the contract of embattled Chancellor Dannel Malloy for another year.
Wednesday, we reported on a set of financial projections characterized by board chair Trish Riley as “worrisome.” A fairly dismal presentation to trustees laid out a best-case scenario of deficits between $8.5 million and $14 million each year for the next four years, a financial picture likely to result in any combination of further layoffs, further cuts to programming, further increases to tuition and louder calls for state subvention. Worrisome, indeed.
Falling enrollment has a lot to do with the current cashflow predicament. There are about 12 percent fewer students preparing to attend UMaine now than at this time five years ago. Since 2019, by one estimate, about 1 million fewer U.S. students have decided to enroll in college.
For would-be attendees across the country, the decision-making calculus appears to be changing. Besmirched by the college admissions scandal and more recently blown apart by the pandemic, pursuit of post-secondary education (like clockwork, for certain cohorts) is no longer a matter of course.
There are myriad reasons to rethink the need for a college degree in 2022. American fear of being crippled by student debt is at fever pitch. The consequent interrogation of return-on-investment by prospective students and their families, assisted by more data and data-crunching resources than ever, can reveal that the numbers, often staggering, simply don’t work out.
Notions of prestige have scant emotional resonance to the savvy members of Gen Z; closer attention is being paid to the learning experience. Some semblance of the European concept of the “gap year” – a breather availed of by an unprecedented number of Americans during COVID-19 – may gain traction, giving young people at least 12 months to experience life after high school on their own terms, taking stock of its potential avenues and possibly changing course in the process.
On top of all that, the weirdest labor market in living memory is bending over backward to accommodate people. Companies are emphasizing skills over education and enthusiastically touting on-the-job training, something that should be more often guaranteed than conceded to, for what can feel like the first time. The elimination of degree or diploma requirements across a host of industries allows more direct entry into even previously hard-to-access parts of the working world.
Warnings have been sounded, including by this newspaper, about the long-term ill effects of falling enrollment rates on more marginalized and lower-income communities. But maybe the old springboards are in the process of being replaced by new springboards, so that a college education no longer represents the singular “ticket out” it once did.
The recovery to enrollment anticipated as the pandemic came under our control has yet to materialize. As the viability of alternative means of learning and training is further borne out, will it ever? If the answer is no, and we let some assumptions about economic mobility subside, higher education the world over will have to fundamentally change the way it operates. Good.
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