Welcome back to another article in the “Our Children” series. The last article demonstrated that despite the pandemic occurring five years ago, education levels remain low, and that’s a pattern that predates 2020. After examining numerous reasons why education rates are not increasing, including technological, political, and economic factors, some questions remain unanswered. What do these low scores mean for the future of college education? Why should we — college-aged students — care, and what can we do to ensure that future generations have an opportunity for academic success?
Effects on Colleges
The decline in K-12 education doesn’t just impact younger students; it also carries significant consequences for colleges across the nation. As mentioned in part one, The New York Times reported that as K-12 education drops, students are less prepared for the academic skills they need in college. This has led professors to catch students up while also teaching the material students need for success in their current classes.
Not only are students and professors feeling the pain of lower K-12 schooling, but so are the institutions themselves. According to NPR, many smaller colleges have begun to permanently close, while universities across the nation were projected to see lower enrollment starting this past fall semester. Now this, much like lower education rates themselves, is complicated in and of itself.
First, NPR reported that last spring’s graduating class was “the last before an expected long decline begins in the number of 18-year-olds —the traditional age of students when they enter college.” Part one of this series discussed how, decades later, the Great Recession is still likely a contributing factor to lower educational attainment rates. It also seems to be a factor of lower amounts of students, as “Americans started having fewer babies at the advent of the Great Recession around the end of 2007 — a falling birth rate that has not recovered,” reported NPR. As the baby boomer population heads into retirement, this gap widens.
Additionally, after the pandemic, “colleges and universities already collectively experienced a 15% decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021,” NPR reported. A number of reasons could explain this statistic, such as the high cost of higher education, as students and providers were losing jobs due to pandemic shutdowns and regulations.
Additionally, recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center reported that the value of higher education is decreasing. UCF’s Associate Professor of English and Interim Associate Chair of the English Department, Dr. Emily Johnson, taught middle school in 2003 and continued for eight years before teaching at the collegiate level. Johnson said that she has “certainly seen a decline in interest in higher education, just culturally.”
NPR also reported that while this is likely to lead to higher admission rates and lower tuition, with fewer students in college, a vicious cycle emerges in which more students opt out of college education, and, in turn, skilled labor jobs are reduced. If that’s the case, NPR suggested that more jobs will require secondary degrees. With fewer jobs and higher educational requirements, making ends meet to maintain the lifestyle many have today becomes more difficult.
When reaching out to faculty at UCF’s School of Teacher Education in the College of Community Innovation and Education with questions on K-12 declines and their effect on colleges, they responded that they did not have “faculty with the expertise needed at this time.”
Closing the Gaps
At this point, between the two articles, we have examined K-12 education statistics, discussed the various reasons these numbers may be lower, and explored what that means for future college students and the institutions themselves. But what can we do to close these gaps?
According to The New York Times, “States and school districts have worked to improve early reading instruction and provide broader access to advanced math.” While these practices have yet to make a difference nationally, certain policies have made a difference in each state. If they continue to succeed, they could become nationwide policies, ultimately benefiting the country as a whole.
For example, The New York Times reported that Louisiana is one of the few states with improved reading. According to the Times, “Though their overall reading achievement was in line with the national average, a broad swath of students had matched or exceeded prepandemic achievement levels.” The state has adopted the science of reading, “a set of strategies to align early literacy teaching with cognitive science research,” an approach spreading across the country but yet to make a national impact, the Times reported.
The New York Times also reported that Mississippi has “received widespread attention for dramatically improving reading scores” after adopting the science of reading method and focusing on lower-performing students. Additionally, the state has held schools accountable by assigning them letter grades based on students’ exam scores and provided them with literacy coaches.
Similarly, NPR reported that “Alabama was the only state where fourth-graders’ average math scores surpassed 2019 scores.” This was due to a state law that passed, which “aimed at improving math proficiency for all K-5 students.”
On the state level, these methods and results are certainly optimistic, but how they are implemented nationally remains uncertain. Furthermore, while it’s certainly a good sign that students are reaching “basic” learning levels, Director of K-12 Education at the Gates Foundation, Bob Hughes, told The New York Times, “That’s a midpoint” and “We need to be thinking hard about getting more kids to proficiency.”
Although state policy is certainly starting to reverse this decline, changing it through national politics is somewhat more challenging. Not only is it difficult to get politicians of different parties and states to agree on a measure, but as Johnson said, “it’s really easy for politicians to say, well, ‘education is broken and elect me, and I’ll fix it.’ And then the next person comes along and says the same thing despite the success or failures of their predecessor.”
“It’s one of those things that everyone thinks they know everything about because they’ve been in class. We’ve all been in school, so we think we know how to teach, [but] actually, it’s tricky,” Johnson said.
There is a similar pattern with absenteeism, another factor in lower education rates. As mentioned in part one, according to the New York Times, more students have been attending classes since 2022 in fourth and eighth grade, but student “absence rates remain significantly higher than they were pre-pandemic.” Experts emphasize that the first step to students’ academic success is attending school consistently.
When it comes to phones and social media, however, the answer is less straightforward. Technology is constantly evolving and increasingly integrated into our lives, so it isn’t practical to rule it out completely, especially when it can be beneficial in certain cases. Still, it’s clear that it affects students.
“Even at the higher ed level, we try to structure our courses and our content for students around a shorter attention span,” Johnson said, attributing this shift partly to students’ busy lives and partly to changing focus levels. “So we’re adapting, and that’s been a long time coming.”
Johnson also reflected on how concerns about attention spans aren’t new. When she was a child, Johnson said that many adults warned that “television was going to rot our brains and destroy our attention spans.”
“Maybe it did, but the whole world did. It happened to all of us. We kind of all have adapted together,” Johnson said. “I want you to want to do this assignment. I want you to see how learning this skill will translate to a better job or an easier time on your job.”
Dr. Emily Johnson
Historian of Science at Princeton, D. Graham Burnett echoed this sentiment.
“It’s important that we not throw out reading, but we have to work with where we are,” Burnett told The New York Times. “We are going to carry forward the tradition in powerful ways, and we’re going to do it in ways that are unrecognizable to our grandparents.”
Why Us?
So why should we, as college students, care about how future generations’ education will look? Most obviously, the generation after us will contain people we have a direct connection to, whether that’s younger siblings, our own children, or just someone we care about.
But what’s important to note is that this decline in education is happening now. We don’t have to wait years for the people we care about to be affected; some of those younger people are already experiencing the consequences. Even if we don’t have a personal connection to them, it’s important to remember that they aren’t that far behind us, especially looking at high school statistics. In other words, while we might not feel the direct effects of an educational decline, we will still likely be affected in some way. Additionally, if we look further into the future, while we might not be the ones struggling with our education, the socioeconomic effects will touch all of us.
This raises the question of whether K-12 schools and colleges could work together to help students build stronger skills.
“If we have resources and students who are interested in volunteering and teaching some after-school programs, I think that could be incredibly beneficial,” Johnson said. However, there are practical barriers: “Resources and time are always the issues.”
“The K-12 teachers don’t have resources and time, and really, we don’t either unless we’re able to connect it to our research or grant funding that doesn’t go away,” Johnson said. “It’s tough to make that time, even though it’s certainly an important cause.”
Dr. Emily Johnson
Still, all hope is not yet lost. While education levels are generally declining, there has been some improvement in select states. As long as that improvement persists and is implemented nationwide, there’s a good chance we can get back on track.
As worrisome as these shifts can be, especially when they persist for so long, it’s important to remember there will be fluctuations as time passes. Johnson compares the fluctuations to pendulum swings, as in some years it’s reading, and others it’s math.
To hold on to “hope in bad times and preparation in good times,” Johnson reminds herself that the “focus of the day around education always seems to swing and change.”