How Much Do You Know About Higher Ed?

Explanations from Doug:

Most of our personal perceptions of higher education are shaped by (a) our own experiences (as outdated as they are for some of us) and (b) by what we read and hear. The latter can be inaccurate, biased, or skewed depending on the sources we lean on. 

Public understanding of higher education tends to be heavily influenced by a misguided focus (by politicians, journalists, and others) on a narrow and not-terribly-representative set of wealthy and selective colleges and universities. That often results in people thinking that colleges are more expensive, harder to get into, and dominated by 18-year-olds than they actually are. 

I developed this quiz to correct some (likely) misimpressions, to better allow for a focus on the actual problems that really need fixing. The group I spoke to, made up of a few dozen retired professionals in the Washington, D.C., area, included former government scientists, several emeritus professors, and more than a few lawyers. They were intellectual, informed, and interested, voracious consumers of news from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR and PBS Newshour. And their answers—which were generally on target—reflected those outlets' tendency to view higher education rather narrowly.

Question 1: How many more people are enrolled in college now than there were in 1960?

In fall 2023, almost 18.1 million students were enrolled in degree-granting colleges and universities in the U.S.—about 37 percent of the country's adult population. That's compared to about 4 million students in 1960, which represented about 7.7 of the adult population then. 

Question 2: What percentage of all applicants does the typical four-year college admit?

The acceptance rate of the average college is 73 percent, and four of every five students attend a college that accepts more than half of its applicants. 

Question 3: What proportion of all undergraduate students are enrolled at a community/two-year college (as opposed to a four-year college)?

Federal data show that about three in 10 undergraduate students (29 percent) attended a two-year institution in 2022. But thee number is actually a good bit higher, even as adults have increasingly opted to work rather than enroll in college in recent years. The Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College notes that the federal data exclude from the community college total about a half million students enrolled at predominantly two-year institutions that now offer bachelor's degrees; CCRC puts the community college proportion at 36 percent.

There are lots more people applying to college now than there used to be, and a relatively small number of colleges (those U.S. News has fooled us into thinking are unequivocally the "best") admit a tiny number of applicants. But these first three questions and answers aim to show that the suburban dinner-party chatter about how it's impossible to get into a good college these days isn't the reality for most Americans.

Question 4. What proportion of all undergraduate students are women?

Women significantly outnumber men in college. In 1970, 3.1 million women and 4.3 million men were enrolled as undergraduates in the U.S. In 2020, it was 9.2 million women and 6.7 million men. That shift, from 43.2 percent women to 58 percent women, is evidence both of the success of efforts to expand equitable access by gender and of a crisis that leaves some groups of men—particularly those from key underrepresented minority groups and rural America—at risk of being left behind.