Seth Bodnar is the president of the University of Montana and served in Iraq from 2003-2004 and 2008-2009. He also served in the southern Philippines in 2007.
If you’re attending a college graduation ceremony this month, you might notice something about the students on campus: there aren’t as many as there used to be. Some 2.5 million fewer Americans are enrolled in college than in 2011, and the decline is accelerating. The college-going rate of high school graduates has dropped from 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2022, and if this trend continues, a group of young Americans will — for the first time in our history — enter the workforce with less education than the one before.
