The reasons that Americans drop out of college are primarily financial. The cost of attending college in the USA is far higher than in European countries that have A levels, and students who dropped out put financial reasons as #1. Only 10% of the students who drop out say that classes being too difficult was their major reason. Another 24% of all dropouts said that difficulty of classes was a minor issue. On the other hand, 54% of the students who dropped out said that the need to make money was their major reason.
Also, the graduation rate from the most competitive colleges in the USA is identical to those of the most competitive universities in countries that have A levels.
The difference is that UK students pay less and have governmental loans that are close to the tuition rates, meaning no need for private lenders.
What further plays into it, is that in the U.S. colleges operate on a “class of” system and there is strong expectation that full-time studies must last 4 years, at most a year more.
That leaves students with either/or decisions – find money, or drop out completely.
Other countries, with publicly-funded higher education, don’t impose such arbitrary limits. It’s normal for people to take as many or few credits each year as they can manage/afford, potentially while holding a part time job, possibly even taking care of family life.
There are no freshman dorms, nor sophomores, juniors or seniors. People take courses towards a major and at some point they will have the necessary requirements for their sought-after degrees.
The cost of a college education is a big problem. But how could it not be a big problem with a failing public K-12 system that sends too many of its students to colleges with many requiring remedial work? Colleges are much more costly to run than K-12 schools. BTW, many of the dropouts weren’t going to admit that they dropped out because they couldn’t handle the difficulty of classes, even if they did.
Very, very few people have extra money to invest when their child is a baby consistently until their child is old enough to attend college.
Many people who make 200k didn’t make 200k when their 18 year old was a baby.
This is going to be a major cliff of ability to pay as younger generations of parents become the parents who are paying for their now minor children to attend college. These are the parents who were laid off from corporate downsizing in 2008, 2020, and recently.
The ability of high income applicant families to pay is going to fall off a cliff in the next decade plus at the same time that the population of children in the US accelerates its decline.
It’s not the job of the federal government to tell colleges what to do to manage these social changes. Administrators need to take the initiative to educate themselves about the forces in the broader American economy and the impact that those forces have had on even high income families. If they continue doing as they are doing, that 50% that is full pay will be increasingly generational wealth, not self pay, and there is far less generational wealth in the US available for young people to go to college than there recently were and still are parents who were old enough to benefit from the economic opportunities present in recurrent recessions. That’s what you are describing.
Admissions is the least of college administrators’ problems.
Here’s a couple of sources for beginners. There is a lot of census and financial data tracking this over time that these sources are using for their articles.
Neither of those articles address your statement that the ‘ability of high income families to pay for college over the next decade’. One article discusses net worth and has data showing an increase in family net worth between 2016 and 2019. The other shows a low net savings rate that has nothing to do with high income families and their ability to pay for college.
But colleges aren’t more expensive to run due to remedial classes. After all, the cheapest colleges to run, the community colleges, offer the most remedial classes. No, the reason American colleges are expensive to run is because American colleges aren’t just institutes of higher learning. American colleges are also sleep-away camps, and finishing schools, and sports franchises, and restaurants, and high-end gyms, and medical clinics, and social clubs.
I agree with you that colleges are expensive because of all the “extras” they provide (that community colleges don’t). Because of those “extras”, they’re too expensive to be places for remedial work.
Yes, they are too expensive to be places of remedial work. But they are too expensive period. You could take away all their remedial classes and that wouldn’t change the cost much.
The core question is whether anyone requiring remedial classes should be enrolling in the first place?
Rather than everyone getting a “college education”, where at best 1/3rd of the credits go towards the eventual major, maybe most should be getting “job/professional” education for half the time and cost, and where classes represent someone’s existing ability/interest, not requiring remedial classes in completely unrelated areas?
The links I make in those statements (which indeed can be connected by a deeper dive into the BLS data) are far more related to the ability of ‘wealthy’ families to pay for college as the claim that families making 200k/year have the ability to pay full COA for any private college in the nation. The missing implicit assumptions in all of those posts is the effect of taxation and annual income consistency on ability to pay.
You are, of course, free to disagree, but that doesn’t make those assumptions (regarding ability to pay) realistic at all.
Not enrolling any student who needs remedial work (including those who fail prefrosh summer placement testing) would significantly reduce enrollment at most four year colleges.
Or at least delay it by a year, while student either gets themselves READY for college, e.g., taking a year at community colleges – or determines (or parents/grandparents come to realize) that college is NOT for everyone and pursues other career development paths?
I think one of the reasons why wealthy dominate selective colleges is because selective colleges still largely rely on their pipeline of established set of private and highly ranked public schools to fill their incoming class. University of Chicago representatives come to my town and only visit three private schools. If you want to attend U Chicago out of our area, you better be going to those three schools. You don’t need to be extraordinary, but need to graduate in the top 10% of those three schools. A stronger kid at a local public is simply not even looked at. I suspect because many elite colleges don’t trust the education of most high schools provide. If you happen or have a hook (URM, first generation, athlete), then your odds are extraordinarily improved out of feeder schools but not necessarily out of rest of the schools. So they did pull back admitting only from feeders, but the spaces that opened up are mostly going to Questbridge applicants. So you can imagine that kids attending those feeders mostly come from very wealthy families. I think this process has less to do with AP scores and more to do with AP scores AND certain brand of schools.
We live in Massachusetts which has a lot of great public and private high schools. The University of Chicago has never visited our local public high school, but seems to keep taking anywhere from 1-4 students every year.
U Chicago is known for its preference for kids from specific “feeder schools”, to the point that, at least at one private feeder school, admissions to U Chicago was considered to be a “safety”. The fact that any student can consider a college with acceptance rates in the single digits to be a “safety” at any level means that that student has a serious hook. So for U Chicago, attendings some specific “feeder schools” is a serious hook.
So @Medea1’s analysis of the situation seem to be supported by research from UofC people themselves:
Today, the times reported on a new study, by Raj Chetty and David Deming of Harvard and John Friedman of Brown, that demonstrates that the country’s most qualified high school students are indeed disproportionately affluent.
7% of top students come from the top 1% of income – however, colleges amplify that effect. There, those 1% are overrepresented by more than factor two: 16%.
It also goes into the cost of becoming a competitive athlete - which to a large degree is also reserved for affluent parents, not a way for underprivileged kids to “work” their way into elite schools.
