Why Are So Many Millennials Dropping Out of College?

The college-going rate among new high-school graduates in the United States has been on a steady rise since the 1970s. Four decades ago, fewer than half of high-school graduates in the U.S. went on to college the following fall. Today, nearly 66 percent do.

While many more high-school graduates start college these days compared to past generations, many more also never finish. There are nearly 45 million Americans over the age of 24 who have some college and no degree. Of those, the largest slice are in their 20s.

By age 29, fewer than one-third of Americans have earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 40 percent have started college but never finished by the time they turn 30. (That share also includes those who earned an associate’s degree. The government shouldn’t merge those numbers since some associate’s degrees pay off in the marketplace.)  

Nearly 50 percent of women have a bachelor's degree by age 29, compared with about 40 percent of men

Among the dropouts, many are men. Women are much more likely to start college and finish. Nearly 50 percent of women have a bachelor's degree by age 29, compared with about 40 percent of men.

I met many of these young adults who have some college credit but no degree as I traveled the country over the last two years reporting for my book, There Is Life After College. What I found is that many were part of a generation who were told almost from their first day in elementary school that going to college was a ticket to a better life. In high school, they jumped on the conveyor belt to college, even if they didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives or why they were going.

This track leads many teenagers to pick careers based on what is familiar to them, not necessarily what they might be passionate about. If their neighbors or parents or parents of friends are doctors, lawyers, and teachers, they will likely choose one of those paths as well. With many occupations found primarily in only certain regions—tech jobs, for example, are largely concentrated along the coasts—swaths of students have no exposure to careers that might interest them.

So when students sift through job openings as seniors in college, many titles sound as if they were written in a foreign language. Several college seniors told me they had no idea that so many different jobs existed. Still, they have little information on what the jobs entail, and more important, what they need to do in order to get them. And if they are second semester seniors, it’s too late to change course, especially if they have student loans to pay off.

In a poll of 20-somethings commissioned for my book, I found that 65 percent of Millennials struggle to find gainful employment or a meaningful career in their early twenties. They are either Wanderers (who take until their mid-twenties to get going) or Stragglers (who take all of their twenties). The seeds of becoming a Wanderer or Straggler are planted years earlier, when students leave high school without much of a plan about what to do next.

“It’s important to have clarity about where you want to go,” said Andy Chan, who heads up career services at Wake Forest University, “knowing you can change the way of getting there.”

Students who start college and never finish are no better off financially than high-school graduates who never attempted college at all. In some ways, they might be worse off if they have debt from their college experience.

Given these trends, as the baby boomer generation leaves the workforce, the U.S. risks having successive generations less educated than the ones that preceded them for the first time. 

In an increasingly global, information-driven economy where automation and artificial intelligence threatens the future of entire occupations, some sort of education after high school is a necessity. But the existing higher-education pathway the U.S. laid out a generation ago for a different economy is not working for too many young adults in this 21st century.

Today, teenagers and those in their 20s would benefit greatly by getting more exposure to a wider variety of jobs and careers at an earlier age so they can better make decisions about what comes after high school. By creating more pathways for students—including two-year colleges, apprenticeships, and transition years between high school and college—we can ensure that future generations are better prepared for the workforce of tomorrow.

Jeffrey Selingo is author of the new book, There Is Life After College. You can follow his writing here, on Twitter @jselingo, on Facebook, and sign up for free newsletters about the future of higher education at jeffselingo.com.

He is a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s Grade Point blog, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and a visiting scholar atGeorgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities.