The Price of Independence: The Economics of Early Adulthood

5. Blurring the Boundary: Changes in Collegiate Participation and the Transition to Adulthood

Chapter 5 Blurring the Boundary: Changes in Collegiate Participation and the Transition to Adulthood MARIA D. FITZPATRICK AND SARAH E. TURNER T oday college enrollment and activities like working and raising a family are not mutually exclusive. During the early 1970s, nearly three-fourths of undergraduate students fell into the eighteen-totwenty -one age bracket, but today only about 56 percent fit that description (U.S. Bureau of the Census n.d.). It is not just the age of college participants that has changed but the boundaries between college-going and other adult activities such as employment , marriage, and child-rearing. Among those enrolled in college over the age of twenty-four, nearly 70 percent are also employed, while the share of college students under the age of twenty-four also employed has increased markedly as well. At the start of the 1970s, it was uncommon for a woman in her mid-twenties to be enrolled in college, and even rarer for married women or women with children to be college students. By the year 2000 the enrollment rate of women in their twenties had surpassed that of men, while the barriers to college enrollment for married women and women with children had fallen appreciably. In effect, the boundary between collegiate enrollment and adulthood has become blurred. This chapter traces these changes in the timing and duration of college participation over the course of the last three decades and explores various reasons for the change. One possible explanation involves market failures or barriers that prevent or delay students from earning degrees through a full-time, direct course of study.1 Such barriers include credit constraints (the inability to borrow against future earnings 107 108 The Price of Independence to finance full-time collegiate enrollment), poor information about college choices, and deficits in college preparation. A quite different type of explanation is that the increase in adult collegiate enrollment reflects an adaptation to changes in the labor market and more college offerings, including continuing education, retraining, and skill development for displaced workers. The expansion of collegiate opportunities to allow students the flexibility to return to study after a time in the labor force or to combine school and work may be one of the great success stories of higher education . And in fact, significant growth over the last three decades has occurred on the extensive margin, drawing into higher education older, nontraditional students. Yet there is also cause for concern that some of the growth in nontraditional students represents the consequences of barriers to attainment, including credit constraints that may limit the capacity of students to withdraw from the labor force to complete collegiate programs. The growing presence of nontraditional students is probably the result of both beneficial changes in the market and instances of market failure, though much of the evidence points to the former as the more influential factor driving the changes of the last three decades. College Enrollment by Age and Gender College enrollment rates (defined as the share of high school graduates with less than a bachelor’s degree enrolled in college) have generally increased for all ages over the last quarter-century. Figure 5.1 shows the broad trend in undergraduate enrollment rates from 1968 to 2003, with younger students in the top graph and older students in the bottom graph. Despite the overall increase, there are differences in the timing and relative rates of growth by age group. For the youngest groups (age eighteen to nineteen and age twenty to twenty-one), which are most likely to represent recent high school graduates and the “traditional” college student, enrollment fell between 1968 and 1973 (from 52.3 percent to 45 percent for the eighteen- to nineteen-year-old group) before starting a relatively steady climb through the late 1990s, when enrollment rates reached 64 percent in 1998 (and again in 2003). In contrast, after relatively flat enrollment rates through 1986, older students saw substantial enrollment increases, particularly for twenty-five- to twenty-six-yearolds , for whom enrollment rose from 10 percent in 1986 to over 19 percent in 2002. Changing Enrollment and Attainment Enrollment—time spent participating in college—should be understood in the context of collegiate attainment. Increases in enrollment rates by Figure 5.1 College Enrollment by Age, 1968 to 2003 Source: Authors’ calculations based on data from the October CPS: CPS weights are used. Note: The measures of years are calculated...