Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 36. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 7:17 PM for 12h 35m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 16.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, Downtown Whitewater, Inc. meets at 6 PM, and the Whitewater School Board meets at 6 PM in closed session & 7 PM in open session.
On this day in 1862, in the Battle of Glorieta Pass, Union forces stop the Confederate invasion of the New Mexico Territory. (The battle began on March 26.)
Rich Kremer reports Fewer Wisconsin high school students are going to college. A hot labor market may be the reason (‘2-year campuses, technical colleges have seen big drops in enrollment, especially among men’):
As a whole, enrollment at the state’s 13 two-year branch campuses has fallen by nearly 57 percent, or around 7,400 students, since 2010. Some universities, like UW-River Falls, UW-Stevens Point and UW-Milwaukee, have seen enrollment decline between around 21 percent and 26 percent in that time, but the sharpest declines were at branch institutions
UW System chief data analyst Ben Passmore said it’s a huge challenge, in part because two-year campuses are access points for students who may not go to college otherwise.
“It seems pretty clear that the attractiveness of that kind of associate route, certainly to follow that all the way through the associate’s degree and transfer, declined over the last decade,” Passmore said. “I don’t have a great theory as to why.”
The percentage of Wisconsin high school students enrolling directly into college is also falling. The drop is most notable among young men, but the overall trend has big implications for individuals and institutions already facing significant, long-term enrollment declines.
After a recent peak of 70,717 high school graduates in 2008, the number fell 9.3 percent — or 6,584 individuals — by 2017 according to UW System data.
Kremer’s story cites those who link these changes, in part, to Wisconsin’s economy:
At the same time fewer Wisconsin high school graduates are choosing college, many businesses are raising wages and offering signing bonuses in an attempt to find workers. A Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce survey released in February found 88 percent of employers were struggling to hire.
Enrollments at two-year technical and community colleges follow economic conditions. When unemployment is high, like it was in the wake of the Great Recession, two-year enrollments tend to surge.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Wisconsin in 2020, unemployment spiked to 10.4 percent.
“And everybody had very high expectations, all this talk about how it’s going to be a windfall for us,” Wisconsin Technical College System President Morna Foy told WPR. “It’s going to be years of huge enrollment growth. And that didn’t happen.”
When students see college, whether of two-year or four-year programs, as a route simply to employment, then college enrollment will necessarily follow economic trends. People are, after all, disinclined to do what they think doesn’t matter. If, by contrast, a college education appears as more than a means to an end, if it seems a worthy pursuit in and of itself, then even good employment prospects will not be enough to tempt prospective students away from a college education.
Over the last decade, WISGOP politicians have pushed go-out-and-get-a-job over get-an-education, and that has only exacerbated a view of higher education as merely instrumental to other ends. See Where Scott Walker Got His Utilitarian View of Higher Education — and Why It Matters (Chronicle of Higher Education, paywall).