Because the schools are passing/producing more bad grads than ever, probably, regardless of total enrollment numbers. There are two rough ways to take this:

A. The bar is needlessly high, its just gatekeeping credentialism

B. The median school output (the median grad) is increasingly worse.

I think the actual issue is B. I think its worse than most people want to admit. It stuck out to me when I was doing a little reading about why CS enrollment seems so low[1]. Quoting my own findings here:

> What supports this theory? Can we prove aptitude is flat? Kinda. In 1970s 1-in-2 college grads aced Wordsum test. Today 1-in-6 do.[2] Using that as a proxy for IQ of the median college grad, in the 70’s it was ~112, now its ~100.

> In other words we have more people going to college than ever, but the “average grad” is less intelligent than ever. Degrees are increasingly diluted yet expensive. You can pay more money than ever to show that you are of average intelligence.

And California State is trying to push more grads through than ever, so I wonder just how comparable the pool of talent is vs other states.

> With the CSU remedial overhaul they are redefining “college readiness” as “willingness to pay the cash”. They are giving college credit for courses that 8th graders could complete. This is the most provable reduction in academic rigor I’ve seen, and it’s happening in the largest college system in the US. If anyone can explain why we shouldn’t be unhappy with a future of thousands of college grads with 8th grade reading skills, I’m all ears for the optimism.

> What’s weirder, their stated reasons for doing this are to “raise graduation rates.” That’s it. More dollars in the door, more college grads with 8th grade reading levels out.

Source for I'm talking about:
https://edsource.org/2017/csu-to-overhaul-remedial-education...

I hope I'm totally wrong but I suspect the dumbing down of the bar is another bad sign. Don't take it lightly IMO.

See also blatherard's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14772630

~~~

So: Why now?

From the Boston Globe[3] in 2014:

> Much of the flight from law school reflects the brutal reality of the employment market for lawyers. The National Association for Law Placement reports that fewer than half of lawyers graduating in 2011 eventually landed jobs in a law firm. Only 65 percent found positions requiring passage of the bar exam. At a time when many law school graduates are shouldering student-loan debts of $125,000 or more, compensation has declined painfully — the median starting salary for new lawyers in 2012 was just $61,000. And quite a few can’t find any work at all: Nine months after receiving their law degrees, 11.2 percent of the class of 2013 was unemployed.

In light of this, why is declining enrollment bad precisely, as the deans of law schools suggest in the NYT? Anything other than vested interest?

[1] (My theory is that CS enrollment is about flat because aptitude is about flat, and that rising college enrollment numbers don't represent the production of more smart people at all, they are totally masked by issues like this. CS is flat because its hard and not easy to fake your way through. More about the educational decline here: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/why-is-computer-science-enr...)

[2] I’m using the data here: http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss16

[3] https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bu...