Doug Belkin
speaker
287 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2017
last heard Mar 2023
Doug Belkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The number of people who've been going to college in the United States has been increasing as the population is increasing and as the rate of college going has increased since the 70s.
As that has happened, pretty much every school in the country has experienced a surge in enrollment and sort of a high tide lifts all boats.
That began to change around 2011 when two things happened.
There was a demographic dip among the number of kids who are graduating high school, and that is going to get a lot worse over the years to come.
And the perceived value of a four-year degree has begun to diminish, and so that has begun to impact whether or not kids go to school in the first place.
College was considered a public good for a long time in this country.
And as a result, for state schools, for public schools, taxpayers footed the bill for most of that education.
That has shifted.
Lawmakers have pulled money out of higher education in a lot of cases, and the burden has moved on to students.
So tuition has gotten much higher.
As a result, it's a much more risky proposition to go to college today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
And you're seeing that in two ways.
The student debt numbers are climbing through the roof.
It's about $1.4 trillion in student debt.
And the numbers of folks who cannot pay that debt, who are defaulting on that debt, is rapidly increasing as well.
So you've got kids who are dropping out of school at a pretty significant rate, and even kids who are finishing are oftentimes getting jobs that don't demand their college credential, so they're underemployed, and oftentimes they're not earning as much as they thought that they would.
So these things have made a college degree less of a sure thing than it used to be, and that has given folks pause about whether or not they should be investing significant money in getting a degree and what kind of risk they want to take on.
So for a long time, a four-year college was sort of the only game in town.
That was the credential you needed to enter the professional classes or to be considered a sort of a well-educated American.
And that's shifting.
Showing 161–180 of 287 · page 9 of 15
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