Something very different and quite noteworthy is happening at the K-12 level, though, where traditionally at-risk students, particularly kids of color, are responsible for the biggest improvements in high-school completion. Conversely, disadvantaged students, in this case those who are poor or coming from families without a history of going to college, are a big reason the college-enrollment numbers are going down, as are people over age 25. Based on U.S. Census Bureau figures, the percentage of students from low-income families attending college immediately after getting their high-school diplomas has declined by 10 percentage points since 2008, to 46 percent. Only those institutions that serve the largest percentages of disadvantaged students—two-year and for-profit colleges—have seen enrollment drop; it’s actually slightly increased or remained steady at four-year institutions.

“We think that others and ourselves need to be asking some pretty hard questions about why this might have happened,” said American Council on Education’s Terry Hartle, who co-wrote a report on the declining enrollment rates, to The Washington Post last November. “This information cries for more analysis.”

In some ways, the high-school graduates who head straight into the labor market are the most practical among diploma recipients. The Atlantic’s Gillian White has pointed out that the types of institutions seeing the most significant declines in enrollment tend to offer degrees that provide only marginal improvements in job prospects compared to high-school diplomas. Today, the popularity of a given degree and its return on investment are often “almost inversely related,” said Anthony Carnevale, who directs Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. The high-school graduates who tend to forgo college and make it in the economy, Carnevale added, are also the ones who can land jobs that aren’t traditionally associated with higher-education degrees—blue-collar fields such as manufacturing, mining, and agriculture. Carnevale said there are only a few ways to beat the college wage premium—the income advantage of having a college degree—“and generally the only people who beat this game are boys.” In blue-collar jobs, “you can work your way up, learn on the job. But there’s none of that for females. Basically, there’s no real pathway for girls out of high school [except college].” No wonder women account for a majority of today’s college-degree-holders. “When enrollments go down, the first thing you lose are the boys.”

But going the non-college route is increasingly impractical, even when the objective is a job that’s more vocational in nature. While a job may certainly be an appealing alternative to an increasingly costly postsecondary education, the college wage premium has risen drastically since the early 1980s. The Pew Research Center called this “the rising cost of not going to college” in a report last year, concluding, “On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment—from personal earnings to job satisfaction to the share employed full time—young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education. And when today’s young adults are compared with previous generations, the disparity in economic outcomes between college graduates and those with a high school diploma or less formal schooling has never been greater in the modern era.” These economic benefits even affect those who start college but don’t complete it, according to some research. Moreover, if recent trends are any indication, the people who skip out on school altogether probably won’t ever get a chance to get their degrees.