As the supply of young people dries up, towns built around America’s higher education system will learn what happens when the students stop coming
Earlier this year, on a visit back to my alma mater, Western Kentucky University, I spoke to a student majoring in business who told me he might drop out of college to take a factory job near home. Tuition was going up (again) and he wasn’t sure if there was anything waiting for him at the end of this yellow brick road. He was scared.
I certainly didn’t know what to tell him. I wanted to say the degree would pay off, that education is worth the investment. But I graduated in 2019, months before the pandemic. College has changed, and so have jobs. I didn’t have an answer for him because the institutions themselves don’t seem to have an answer either.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. A student leaving college for factory work — the very jobs that disappeared in the First Rust Belt, now somehow seeming more reliable than a degree. It’s the kind of reversal that makes you wonder if the life path forward is actually backward, or if there’s a path at all. The answer, it turns out, is bigger than one student’s choice.