Modern college education: “But Brawndo’s got
what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!”

According to a report by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, college enrollment in 2023 dropped by 5% from the previous year, suggesting that high school students are beginning to question the value of attending colleges where anti-Semitism and bigotry is promoted and white and Asian students are treated like dirt.

It could also be because they are beginning to realize that — at least in the soft sciences like history, sociology, literature, etc — all they will get is leftist/Marxist indoctrination, not a true education.

The statistics point in this direction:

Enrollment declined across racial groups for 18-year-old freshmen, though white students saw the steepest decline, the analysis found. White 18-year-old enrollment dropped 10 percent between fall 2023 and 2024, compared to 8.4 percent for multiracial students, 8.2 percent for Black students, 5.7 percent for Asian students and 2.1 percent for Hispanic students.

However, at highly selective colleges and universities, the starkest enrollment drops were among freshmen of color, according to the analysis. White 18-year-old enrollment at those institutions only fell 4.7 percent, whereas Black freshman enrollment plummeted 19.6 percent at highly selective public institutions and 13.8 percent at highly selective private ones. Multiracial students saw similarly sharp declines: 14.8 percent at highly selective public institutions and 13.7 percent at highly selective private institutions. Hispanic freshman enrollment also fell—8.9 percent at highly selective public institutions and 6.7 percent at highly selective private ones.

I suspect the drop in minority enrollment is partly because of the Supreme Court decision against racial quotas, combined with the push to eliminate DEI at colleges. Unqualified minority students are no longer getting a free ride into college. They instead have to qualify, and many cannot.

This decline certainly is a problem that must be addressed, but letting unqualified students into college — the solution for decades — is not and never was the solution. Better to make everyone understand what you really must do to prepare for college, and thus encourage everyone — from all races — to do it.

Officials from the clearinghouse of course can’t mention any of these factors. To do so would be to admit the garbage quality of too many public and so-called “elite” universities. Instead it blames our incompetent federal government, specifically the Department of Education’s delayed rollout of its Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

The new form, intended to simplify the financial aid process, was riddled with glitches that made it hard for many to complete and waylaid students’ financial aid packages.

Heh. I sincerely believe the Department of Education’s effort to streamline this application form ended up producing something harder and maybe impossible to complete. This kind of bungling is par for the course for our federal government. (My readers will of course be aware of the FAA’s Part 450 space industry regulation, touted in 2021 when it was introduced as a fast and simpler licensing process which instead practically destroyed the emerging American rocket industry with its red tape.)

Nonetheless, I doubt the FAFSA form is cause of this enrollment decline. If a high school student wants to go to college and needs the federal aid, they won’t be stopped because they are having trouble filling out a form. No, the decision not to go to college is always founded on much more fundamental factors, and in this case those factors come from with the horrible quality of education produced by too many colleges.