Students Consider Alternatives to College as Enrollment Drops

The third floor of the Golda Meir Library on UW-Milwaukee’s campus is nearly silent. The only sound is typing on a keyboard or the occasional whisper between two students. On the far northeast corner, sitting at his favorite spot to do homework, is junior History major Nathan Brown.

“My workload is a lot but honestly not as bad as I was expecting,” said Brown. “I was expecting to be miserable all the time in college. I’m only miserable sometimes though.”

Brown also expressed doubts about if the challenging workload in college was worth the eventual outcome.

“I know that financially, majoring in History was probably not my best option,” said Brown. “I could find many different jobs that would be better financially.”

Brown’s concerns about the cost and benefits of college are not unlike many students in the UW system, as enrollment across Wisconsin has been steadily declining over the past decade. Enrollment peaked in fall 2010 and fell by twenty thousand as of fall 2021.

The biggest drop-off in enrollment in the UW system is in the 20-24 age group. UWM’s main campus alone has seen a decrease of over three thousand students in the past decade.

Even with the decline in enrollment, UWM continued to raise the retention rates for students from their first to second year. That was until the fall of 2020.

“Retention is number one,” said UWM Vice Provost for Student Success Dave Clark. “We started new programs this year targeted at students who come in with certain levels of high school GPA, because we dug into the data and saw which students were most likely to not make it into their second year. We figured out it was largely the students in that middle population. If a student ends up on academic probation, we might offer them a scholarship to help them”.

The decline in enrollment could also be attributed to the increase in options for students coming out of high school.

“I should have just gone to the fire academy,” said freshman Nursing major Valentina Sesini. “My brother went through the academy in two years and is making more than I will when I finish college, but I probably won’t drop out because I feel like I have to graduate since I’ll be the first in my family.”

The current trajectory of students attending universities will most likely continue with the decline in students graduating from high school as well, so schools like UWM will need to find new ways to keep retention rates high in the coming years. The trends of declining enrollment are present across the country and research suggests it will continue to fall.