Dean Dad: Enrollment At Community College

Dean Dad reports a new phenomenon in his institution, a community college he heads.

This Fall, with just a few weeks to go before the start of classes, we’re seeing a weird bifurcation. Applications for enrollment, and applications for financial aid, are both up significantly even when compared to last year. But students who have actually registered are significantly down. Put differently, the number of students who started trying to attend and then vanished is dramatically higher than it has been in past years.

The folks in Admissions have done follow-up calls to the folks who’ve applied and taken their placement tests but not registered, to see what happened. I was hoping to hear that the most common reason was something like “you were my safety school, but my first choice school came through with a great offer.” Instead, the most common answer was “my unemployment ran out.”

This is where the “education as private good” idea has real social costs. If you have a significant population that just can’t find work because the economy is in the tank, and that population would like to go to college but doesn’t have the income for living expenses -- financial aid is great for tuition and such, but doesn’t do much for living expenses -- then what would you have that population do?

There is discussion that ThePeopleInChargeOfSuchThings have decided to define a 10% unemployment rate as 'The New Normal'. With a 10% 'official' rate translating to an actual 15%-16% rate--well, ya'll, that's a prescription for cultural disaster.

We don't want to go there, and we sure as shootin' don't want to define what we now experience as 'normal'. Stroll through a rural WalMart on a Friday evening, and then tell yourself this is what you can accept as The New Normal.