 Fewer people are going to college these days, and that's great news. For decades, the percentage of recent high school graduates attending college was climbing until about 2008, when it started leveling off. Twelve years later, it went in the other direction, with the largest one-year drop in over 30 years coming between 2019 and 2020. And then it continued falling into 2021, albeit at a lower rate. According to some analysts, it's starting to climb back up, which would be a shame. The Wall Street Journal reports that in the past 10 years, about 200 colleges have closed down, or four times as many as in the previous decade. Meanwhile, in Tennessee, where five colleges have closed since 2016, officials have launched a call to action to try to reverse the trend. The number of Tennessee students choosing to go to college has slipped. The college-going rate has dropped about 10 percent over just the past five years. The commission says in this current economic reality, a high school diploma, it just is not enough. State officials are promising new programs to bring kids back to campus on top of massive federal subsidies for colleges already on the books. Back in 2014, President Obama defended federal policies that encouraged kids to go to college in an interview with Tumblr founder David Karp, who happens to be a high school dropout. These now hold more than a trillion dollars in student debt, one of the greatest expenses they'll incur in their lifetime. And the generation that's just reaching college age is beginning to wonder if it's even worth it. Some people are wondering, is this a good investment? It absolutely is. The difference between a college grad and somebody with a high school diploma is about $28,000 a year in income. So it continues to be a very smart investment for you to go to college. So Obama didn't explain the reason for that wage premium, which isn't based on actual knowledge accrued by college graduates. As the economist Brian Kaplan argued in his 2018 book, The Case Against Education, most people don't learn anything on campus that helps with their actual jobs, and only kids who make it all the way to graduation earn more. That's because a college degree is actually what Kaplan calls a signaling mechanism, or a way of showing that you have the fortitude to make it through. People just want to hire college graduates not because of what they learned in English class, but because they're more likely to arrive on time and do what they're told. Once you accept that a lot of it is about, yes, master, I will conform to what our society demands of me, that's where graduation is so important. That's why in a country where college lasts three years, it's the third year that's crucial. Right. Country where last four years is the fourth year that's crucial. You know, just like in a country where suits are the standard thing you wear, you better wear a suit, or else you look like a weirdo, and people don't want to hire you. So why are fewer students going to college now? One theory is that employers can't afford to care as much, that prospective employees can make it through college, because they're such a big labor shortage that even high school graduates are getting tantalizingly high salaries for teenagers that may be outweighing the draw of college, particularly with such eye-poppingly high tuition rates. Daniel Moody, a 19-year-old who took a job at a Ford plant right out of high school, told the Associated Press that, if I would have gone to college after school, I would be dead broke. The type of money we're making out here, you're not going to be making that while you're trying to go to college. Another explanation for the decline of college attendance is that a lot of people my age are dropping out of the workforce altogether. Okay, that is a big problem, but sending more people to college isn't going to solve it. In 2020, about 75% of kids who took the ACT did so badly that test administrators deemed them unprepared for college, and yet, over 60% of high school graduates still go. If we could bring college attendance down even more, maybe fewer people would drop out and be stuck with loans and no degree to show for them. There were a lot of us with the pandemic, we kind of had a do-it-yourself kind of attitude of, like, oh, I can figure this out. A high school graduate in Tennessee named Grayson Hart told the Associated Press, like many teens, Hart thinks the time and money spent on college could be used more productively by just starting his career. Why do I want to put in all the money to get a piece of paper that really isn't going to help with what I'm doing right now, said Hart, who's directing a youth theater program? I hope more high school students ask themselves that question.