According to Valparaiso University , officials stated the college expects to welcome nearly 1,000 new undergraduate students . Grace College in Winona Lake set a new record for its enrollment when numbers were up 14.9 percent from 2013, while enrollment at Manchester University in Fort Wayne was up by 20 percent.
IU, too, had increased enrollment. The Indiana Daily Student reported last month a “record-breaking group of first-year students” with a freshman class size of 7,708 students.
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics , higher enrollment rates are not atypical and have been increasing since 1991 . Between 2001 and 2011, enrollment in degree-granting institutions was up 32 percent, from 15.9 million to 21.0 million.
This trend, as the data suggests, won’t be decelerating anytime soon. The U.S. Department of Education released projections earlier this year claiming that enrollment in American colleges will increase by nearly three million people between the years 2012 and 2022.
Advancements in technology have played a large role in the changing gap between skilled and unskilled workers, John Stone , lecturer of economics at IU , said.
While the increase of workers in the skilled labor market might not affect unemployment in a relatively free market, it may have a large role in the nominal value that skilled workers get paid.
“Typically in economics, we see that in a relatively free market, the wage will adjust downward to eliminate a surplus of workers,” Stone said.
It’s all about supply and demand of the skilled workers, Stone added.
Also increasing with the size of the future skilled labor market is the complexity of the unskilled labor market.
“We often think of college graduates as skilled workers,” Stone said, “But perhaps little stands in the way of including trade school graduates in this group as well. Perhaps this is made less consequential by the fact that few individuals attend trade schools, so including them in the skilled sector may not make that much of a difference in the data.”
