Sep 18, 2014 3 min read

California University of Pennsylvania is eliminating 30 jobs because of a 3.2 percent drop in enrollment this year. The university, which had a high of 9,483 students in 2011, now has just below 8,000.

Cal spokeswoman Christine Kindl explained that a baby boom has ended and that high schools across the country have been graduating smaller classes. She added that the university is competing for students with the booming Marcellus gas industry, which offers high-paying jobs to high school graduates.

Meanwhile, Washington & Jefferson College experienced a jump in enrollment this fall, following several years of smaller freshman classes.

Across the nation, fewer students are beginning college. The National Student Clearinghouse found that 300,000 fewer students enrolled in colleges and universities this year, the second consecutive annual decline.

Demographic changes and a sharp drop in interest in for-profit schools have been cited as reasons for the decline, but something else might be going on here: a change in the opinion Americans hold of the value of a college education.

Over the past generation, the cost of higher education has increased at well above the rate of inflation. The annual cost of room, board and tuition at a private, four-year college in 1994 was typically about $20,000. Today, the same school may be charging $50,000 or more. The result is that students take on enormous debt.

Nationally, the average student-loan debt is $29,400, but it is not at all unusual for a student to graduate with more than $100,000 in loan debt hanging over her head, even before beginning graduate school. Total student loan debt is now estimated to be about $1 trillion.

It used to be that college and university graduates could count on finding jobs that paid well enough to handle the payments on their loans, but that’s not the case anymore for the typical graduate. The person serving you your roll and coffee at Panera may well have a bachelor’s degree in history or a master’s in French literature.

Could it be that parents and their teenage children are starting to think that acquiring huge debt in order to obtain a low-paying job is not a good life strategy? That going to college right after high school and learning to party four nights a week while getting a little learning on the side isn’t worth the cost?

The nation’s unemployment rate is still high at 6.1 percent, but employers are having a difficult time filling skilled-labor positions – ones that don’t necessarily require a college degree. The Marcellus gas and coal industries are good examples. Good-paying jobs are unfilled because too few applicants can’t pass literacy or drug tests.

With 20 million Americans now enrolled in institutions of higher education, there is no shortage of college graduates, but there are shortages of auto mechanics, bricklayers, nurses, carpenters, plumbers and electricians.

We wonder if more people are thinking that working after high school, saving money and taking college classes later, paying as they go, is a better strategy than accumulating burdensome debt.

A college eduction is enormously valuable, but it needn’t be reserved primarily for those just out of high school, many of whom are still not mature enough to appreciate the educational opportunities offered them.

We can’t say that delaying enrollment in colleges and universities is or will be a trend, but if anything can control or even reduce the cost of higher education, that would be it.