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Originally Posted by AGDee
I suspect they will skyrocket for Fall 2021. With all the uncertainty, a lot of kids took gap years. Who wants to pay mega tuition to stay at home and take courses online?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by *winter*
Yeah- a generation is a bit dramatic.
I took a gap year before gap years were a “thing”...as a working class person, I was ready to rush into college after a year of low paying menial jobs.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by andthen
I'm glad others take issue with the title of the article, a year does not make a generation. Honestly if I was a incoming freshman now I would have probably waited too versus paying through the nose for tuition when basically I have to teach myself online.
I would imagine in the next year or two especially as the COVID vaccine rolls out there will be a significant increase in those enrolling.
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You really think that this will be only a little blip on the college enrollment radar? I can't help but think that mindset comes from a position of privilege. These students you speak of taking gap years, I would guess they come from middle-class families where everyone is still employed and no one died from COVID?
Are many young people able to say "Eh, I'll just wait a year and get the full college experience later"? Sure. But there are others who were already struggling to pay and now may look at it as not being a possibility for some time. As research has shown - and I believe the article even mentions - the longer young people wait to attend college, the less likely they are to attend at all.
There are also those in middle school and high school who are struggling academically with this "new normal". How many more kids will slip through the cracks? How many live in broken homes and don't have the escape of going to school for eight hours a day? How many young people already struggle with mental health issues, which are being exacerbated by the pandemic? There are many reports of school systems that have "lost" kids. The students haven't been enrolled in school this year, and while many are being homeschooled, there's still a question of where others are. The hope is that they're being educated somewhere, anywhere.
Ultimately, how much further will socioeconomic gaps widen? As the article states, "For graduates at high-poverty high schools there was a 32.6% decline in attending college, compared with a 16.4% decline for graduates of low-poverty schools."
And will there be a shift from students attending school out-of-state to instead going in-state?
Will enrollment in community colleges increase or decrease in the near future? If increasing, does that mean less tuition dollars for other schools that rely on freshmen and sophomores to start at their institutions instead? And again, as the article said, with potentially less money coming in from the government, many schools could be forced to raise tuition further.
When the pandemic started, we were halfway through spring. Students finished out the school year in a weird way. Now, we're just hitting the halfway mark of a full school year. How will this full year of hybrid schedules and online classes affect not just college students, but high schoolers and middle schoolers who may still be a few years away or more from graduating.
It seems it's still early to predict what will happen, but I would guess we're looking at major shifts in college enrollment over the next five years at least.