\n<\/p>\n
As public skepticism about the value of a college degree persists, the number of students who expect to earn one is also on the decline.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Between 2002 and 2022, the percentage of students surveyed who said they expected to earn a bachelor\u2019s degree or higher fell from 72\u00a0percent to 44\u00a0percent, according to a research brief the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education published Tuesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During the same time frame, the percentage of first-generation students who aspired to earn a degree fell from 60\u00a0percent to 33\u00a0percent; among students with at least one college-educated parent, degree aspirations dropped from 83\u00a0percent to 53\u00a0percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe decline in college aspirations among first-generation students is deeply concerning,\u201d Kimberly Jones, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, which oversees the Pell Institute, said in a news release. \u201cThese students have long faced systemic barriers to higher education, and this data underscores the urgent need for renewed investment in outreach, support, and affordability\u2014including through programs like TRIO and the Pell Grant.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in his quest to shrink the size of the federal government, President Donald Trump has proposed cutting funding for TRIO\u2014a set of federally funded programs that support low-income, first-generation college students and students with disabilities as they navigate academic life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Major cuts to the federal government also mean it will be harder to produce reports like the one the Pell Institute released this week. That\u2019s because such studies rely on data from now-discontinued longitudinal surveys that were administered by the National Center for Education Statistics; the Trump administration fired all but a handful of NCES employees earlier this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout the continuation of these programs, it will be much harder to track the progress of high school, first-generation, and college students and to learn how to improve education outcomes,\u201d Sean Simone, vice president of research at COE, said in the news release.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As public skepticism about the value of a college degree persists, the number of students who expect to earn one is also on the decline.\u00a0 Between 2002 and 2022, the percentage of students surveyed who said they expected to earn a bachelor\u2019s degree or higher fell from 72\u00a0percent to 44\u00a0percent, according to a research brief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[3778,535,9401,16374],"class_list":{"0":"post-27413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-aspirations","9":"tag-college","10":"tag-decline","11":"tag-degree"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}