Demise of the Baccalaureate Degree

Enrollments at American colleges and universities have been on a decade-long skid. This past year, enrollments dropped by 600,000 or 3.5 percent. While some of those drops may have been prompted by the pandemic, the trend is clear — fewer and fewer students are entering college. One must ask if we in higher education have kept up with the rapid acceleration of social, technological and societal changes in every one of our courses, prerequisites, general education requirements and curricula? Are we teaching the competencies and emphases that will be required to thrive in 2025? I fear not.