College Attendance Drops Due to Financial Crisis

Recent predictive studies show that the rate of college enrollment in the United States is highly dependent on the mortgages and equities parents have to pay on their houses. It makes sense that a family sealed in debts will have no way of affording to send their teenagers to get a higher education. University of Michigan researchers said that a couple of years ago, when the economy was still strong, such studies would have been unneeded. Yet, here we are today, questioning whether our children will have the opportunity to enroll in any college in the country.
 

"The years between 18 and 28 have become a distinct period of life between adolescence and adulthood. Even before the current economic problems reached critical proportions, young people were taking longer than in the past to establish themselves and to strike out on their own," said the director of U-M Institute for Social Research's (ISR) Panel Study of Income Dynamics, researcher Frank Stafford.
 

He went on to add that "Some evidence suggests that this period is particularly hard for minority and poor youth, but we need more information about the personal and social characteristics that facilitate or impede progress through this period into productive adulthood. We currently have a very limited understanding of how American youth actually pass through this period, and we know almost nothing about how this passage is related to the youths' families of origin."
 

The current study was conducted on 745 families, sampled from all environments, so as to offer researchers the best possible view on the actual situation in the country today. "About 64 percent of the children of home-owners were enrolled in college, compared with about 33 percent of renters," Stafford pointed out. Also, only 51 percent of parents with equity values of less than $25,000 sent their teenagers to college, as opposed to 88 percent of adults with more than $350,000 in house values.
 

This state of affairs is very troubling, especially among minorities and poor youth. Their inability to access higher education will only affect the entire country in the long-run, as predictions show that skilled workforce might drop over the next decades. Hopefully, comprehensive governmental programs will be set in place, so as to ensure that this doesn't happen.