We heard concerns last week from current University System head Sonny Perdue that more Georgia graduates are failing to enroll in college after high school. Many might see decreasing enrollment as a problem, but it could be a sign of promise in our education systems.
Our students have virtually every situational and economic advantage for success. The HOPE Scholarship pays for all or most tuition. Promises of student loan forgiveness or deferment encourage a gamble to attend college even without a lottery funded program. Schools have even suspended using test scores as a condition of admission.
Yet, a study from the U.K. published last year reports that test scores have dramatically decreased since the on-set of COVID, greater than students who endured the traumatic resettling after Hurricane Katrina. Even worse, a report from the CDC reports over 37% of teenagers admitting to poor mental health during COVID-19 shut downs and an even scarier percentage of young students who have considered suicide. Many are calling them “The Lost Generation.”
After two generations of promotion of college education as the gateway for success, I see the falling college attendance rates as progress that may help this generation find true success.
This failure could mean students make a distinction between learning and education. Education often produces students with lots of letters behind their name and exorbitant student debt. Unless those letters open up a path to a career that dramatically increases income potential, they are often worth less than their price. In contrast, learning is most often self-directed. It produces students who continue to apply knowledge past his or her investment in the degrees with letters. Life-long learners are assets to society and employers. They understand facts are useless without the challenge of application.
This failure could also help us highlight the failings of our systems. We’ve been lagging behind other countries in our STEM achievement for decades. Social emotional learning programs have been in existence for decades. The failures of our students academically and in areas of mental health are symptoms we should make systemic changes to our education system. Better connecting families within schools, educational savings accounts and vouchers, and more partnerships between business and schools are all options that should be on the table.
Finally, this failure gives us an opportunity to reset our priorities. Several decades of instruction that communicates success with a college degree leaves any other students the impression of hopelessness and underachievement. With less students attending college, we have an opportunity to give our students a new message. A student who doesn’t attend college to avoid student debt isn’t a failure. A student who works with his hands and doesn’t have the stomach for upper level math isn’t a failure. Even the student who takes a few years to learn skills on her own isn’t a failure. It’s us, who have sent them that message that have failed them.
Instead, the challenge for us is to embrace this new trend in college attendance. Our students will be successful when they answer a call, learn marketable skills, and meet their full potential, fancy degrees or not.
Alison Smith is a regular contributor to The Madison County Journal.
