If you find yourself in an area with dangerous air quality (like me), I hope you’re staying safe! In this week’s issue, we look at two articles side-by-side that I’m not sure are being read together, even though they probably should be. One covers a new poll about confidence in higher education while the other reports on a large worker shortage predicted in our near future. Read together, they surface an interesting tension for higher education. Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments! 

Confidence Falls While Workers are Needed 

From Democrats' Confidence in Higher Ed Hits Record Low | Inside Higher Ed and As college graduates fret over finding jobs, a record shortage of workers is projected | The Hechinger Report 

As confidence in higher education slips related to people’s perceptions of employment outcomes, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce predicts a large labor shortage in the future. 

Our Thoughts  

While I selected coverage from Inside Higher Ed, almost every higher education media organization is reporting on this latest Lumina Foundation-Gallup poll. Because of this, it’s unlikely that most regular readers haven’t already seen it, but in case you haven’t, the TL;DR version is confidence in higher education has dropped and the largest drop is actually among Democrats. Now, with that out of the way, I actually want to point to something deeper in the survey. Americans holding a bachelor’s degree express almost exactly the same confidence in higher education as Americans with no degree at all, 36 percent against 35 percent, and only the people who went on to a graduate degree, at 49 percent, come out meaningfully more sold. That’s not great. In fact, one of the quoted responses in the article called it “very damning,” which is probably appropriate. It's easy enough to dismiss low confidence from someone who never attended, but when graduates say they're not sure it was worth it at eerily similar rates, it's hard to ignore. 

As for why people are losing confidence, the survey hands us the usual suspects: worries about political agendas on campus at 31 percent, cost at 30 percent, and the belief that we don't prepare students for work at 25 percent. While I could talk about costs again (and again), instead, I want to focus on this work preparation concern. I don’t think brushing it off is the appropriate response. Even though net prices have been decreasing for the past decade, families have watched the sticker price of college climb for the better part of twenty years while the payoff has perhaps not been as evenly distributed as we’d like. So, students and families asking whether the degree translates into meaningful and beneficial employment is a fair question, especially in light of AI and questions about whether companies are hiring fewer entry-level employees. However, if we step back and take a macro look at other higher ed news, we find confounding reports. 

Chief among them is The Hechinger Report's piece on the worker shortage headed our way, and it describes a labor market moving in nearly the opposite direction from the one students and families are preparing for. The story students have absorbed is the AI one, where the bottom rungs get cut, and there's nothing left to climb toward. The economists Jon Marcus talked to are worried about almost the reverse. Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce projects a shortfall of 4.6 million workers by 2032, and Lightcast puts the gap nearer 6 million. The cause isn't AI; it's demographics. Between 2024 and 2032, more than 18 million college-educated workers age out of the workforce as the boomers retire, and fewer than 14 million show up behind them. The jobs going unfilled are largely the ones that AI can’t do: nurses, physicians, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, electricians. Which puts us in a strange spot, where confidence in higher education is hitting bottom on a jobs-and-cost argument at the very moment the economy is about to need the people we produce more than it has in years. I feel like this should be getting more attention. 

Part of what's going on, I think, is that the survey is measuring something real and pinning an incomplete label on it. When someone tells Gallup they've lost confidence in higher education, I'd bet most of them are picturing one specific thing—the four-year residential degree and the perceived price that comes with it. The poll can't see the difference between the various types of colleges, so everything else that counts as postsecondary education (most of which never comes close to that original vision) gets swept into that same picture and judged accordingly. That mislabeling matters for the labor shortage, because while some of the professions on the list need four-year degrees, plenty of the other work still needs postsecondary education that isn't a bachelor's degree at all. We tend to file skilled trades under "no college required," but that's not quite right for all professions. For example, becoming a licensed plumber across most of the country runs through a four-to-five-year apprenticeship, thousands of supervised hours, a few hundred hours of classroom instruction on codes and safety, and a licensing exam. The classroom piece is frequently handled by a community college for a fraction of what a bachelor's degree costs. That's postsecondary education. It just isn't what people mean when they say college, and it's one of the cheaper, more direct routes into some of the exact work we're about to be short on. 

To me, the confidence crisis looks less like a verdict on whether postsecondary education works and more like a failure of how we talk about it. We've let the whole sector get argued on four-year-ROI terms, which means the priciest slice sets the reputation for everybody, and the cheapest, most job-connected tier takes the same hit. Meanwhile, the doom loop keeps tightening. Falling confidence feeds falling enrollment, already down nearly two million students from its 2010 peak, and every student who walks away widens the same shortage that should have been the reason to enroll.  

Honestly, there's a good story here that I'm not sure the sector is telling. Individual institutions might be, but if potential students have already decided against postsecondary education before you can tell your institutional story, you’ve lost a future student. The fields with the deepest holes—health care, education, engineering, and the licensed trades—line up almost perfectly with the "AI-proof" majors students were chasing in a panic this spring when nobody could tell them what those majors even were. We can tell them now. The demand is documented, the pathways are known, and the data is getting better fast; the NASH and National Student Clearinghouse partnership I mentioned a few weeks back is exactly the kind of link between labor-market data and enrollment that turns "trust me, this field is hiring" into something an advisor can actually show a nervous eighteen-year-old and their parents. When I was an advisor, the students I worried about the most were not the ones who didn’t have it all figured out. Instead, it was the ones who selected a “safe” major in some field they were less interested in but felt would lead to a “good job.”  

So, over the next few weeks before the fall semester starts, I would start by looking at whether your campus is set up to have this conversation. Whether advising and career services are looking at current labor-market data, whether the community-college and transfer routes get treated as real options instead of fallbacks, and whether anyone in your enrollment area is ready to argue that the smartest hedge against an AI-scrambled economy might be the very credential families are starting to write off. You don't have to wait for the national numbers to settle to do that. You just have to know which fields your own region is short on and make sure the student across from you this fall can hear it. 

Sparks 

• Career Literacy Strengthens Student Success (Inside Higher Ed) - According a new report from the DeBruce Foundation, students who understand how their skills, education, and experiences connect to various careers are better positioned to navigate the rapidly changing job market. Since people have firmly connected college to careers, I think the need for more career education will only increase at institutions.
• Why Many Young Men Don’t Think College Is for Them (The Chronicle of Higher Education) - A Q&A with Andrew J. Seligsohn, president of Public Agenda, about their recent research on why young men don’t think higher education is for them. Given the steady decline of men attending college, and since half the population is male, this is something worth paying more attention to.
• DHS Finalizes Rule Limiting How Long International Students Can Stay in U.S. (Inside Higher Ed)  - The Department of Homeland Security has changed its policy, stating that international students can only remain in the US for four years to complete their studies unless they receive an extension. Last week, we talked about the impacts from the decline in international enrollment and now we’re going to rush them out of their programs and the country?