This last academic year, Drake University, a mid-sized university, had its smallest freshman class since before 2003. In 2015, there were 803 entering first-year students, with that number declining relatively steadily since then. Although the number of new first-year students dropped to 589 in 2024, Drake’s student body is more racially diverse than ever before, with women making up 61% of the class as they have for the last decade.
Sounds like female empowerment at Drake! Feminists who fought for women’s education, like Malala Yousafzai or Mary Jane Patterson, the first Black woman to graduate from college in 1862, would be so proud.
So, what’s the issue?
As more women outnumber men on campus, which is nothing new for Drake, cultural attitudes towards higher education must adapt to fit both those trends and the narrative of traditionally male-centric power systems. Simultaneously, fewer people are pursuing higher education on a national scale, which raises concerns about how informed and educated the collective is.
NPR reports that across the U.S., colleges and universities collectively faced a 15% decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021. That is 2.7 million fewer students since the decade began.
Such a widespread phenomenon of increasingly fewer people, of all genders, going to college raises the question: why?
For starters, in an economic climate where American graduates owe about $1.6 trillion in student debt, college tuition costs are rising to be less and less affordable. The limited and rather stingy nature of financial aid resources like grants and scholarships is nowhere near sufficient to cover tuition costs when the average price for one year of public college in 2023 was approximately $27,100.
While skilled labor in the U.S. is as important as ever, in practice it does not feel that way for many people. While the 1% elite class holds 30% of the nation’s wealth, everyone else teeters much closer to the verge of homelessness than they do to becoming a billionaire. In an economy where nearly half of full-time workers make below a living wage, and the working class is merely trying to survive, why would you go to school extra long to struggle equally hard?
A rise in anti-intellectualism is also a factor, as seen in the Trump administration’s present attacks on higher education. Education and academia, dominated by women as we know, tend to uphold a progressive curriculum and even encourage radical ideas. Because for a nation where historically only white men had the privilege of speaking, maintaining conservative values and valuing tradition is really a guise to uphold oppression.
Discussion of whether to keep or discard conservative values further lends itself to the wave of anti-intellectualism, where people resist academia in aversion to unfamiliar, uncomfortable ideas and concepts for a changed future nation.
As “the woke agenda” and “political correctness” — very radical, political ideas about treating people with dignity as humans — are condemned, so are higher education, academia and expertise. This disapproval is especially intertwined with gender. I have seen increased cultural thought online and in media where people associate intellectualism and education with femininity and, from there, undermine and disparage it.
Much of this discourse appears to translate into the statistical data showing workforce and education enrollment demographics. The issue of so many young men not going to college seems to come down to identity, masculinity, gender norms and patriarchal variables. God forbid a man under the patriarchy be associated with something gradually being seen as more feminine. Whether they are aware of it or not, these men are appealing to the culture.
We are all merely a product of our culture. Anti-intellectualism speaks to this assertion on an authoritarian level where education systems are intentionally undervalued, underfunded and largely broken — with efforts to make them even weaker currently at play in the caucus.
Many people do not have the media literacy, or plain old literacy skills, to assess and see through the vilification of education and intellectualism, so many are bound to succumb to developing cultural beliefs that do not value education. At this rate of anti-intellectualism, people will continue to blindly support legislation that, unbeknownst to them, is actually hurting them and harming their broader community.
I by no means believe everyone needs to go to college, especially when tuition is massively unaffordable. Undoubtedly, education has a long way to go in reforms of its quality, delivery and economic value.
With this said, there is a sneaky, exploitative nature of anti-intellectualism that is playing people right now, and if we continue to disregard it, it will be the death of a fact-based society. A culture that continues to discourage and illegitimize the power of knowledge will be the death of a society that honors liberation, progress and democracy, for the greater good of every individual of the collective.
