The Lure of Work

Bertch Cabinet really needs workers.

Signs hung from the metal siding of the company’s factory buildings, outside Waterloo, Iowa, are big enough to read from the state highway as you drive past: “Full and Part-time Positions Available, Starting at $18/hr.”

Ashley Stanley, Bertch’s senior human resources manager, said the cabinet manufacturer has had to raise its wages to more than three times the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour to meet its demand for workers.

Nearly 10 percent of the company’s 700 employees are at retirement age, she said, and Bertch is eager to recruit new workers right out of high school. The company is part of a regional trade group promoting manufacturing jobs in the area’s schools through informational sessions and training and apprentice opportunities.

“We’re trying to even get into elementary schools to tell kids, manufacturing’s a really good career,” Stanley said. “You don’t have to go to college, you can make really good money, you learn on the job,” and factories aren’t as dirty and messy as some might think.

In nearby Cedar Falls, the University of Northern Iowa is also trying to attract more students from the state’s high schools.

Undergraduate enrollment at UNI, the state’s public comprehensive, ticked up a percentage point this fall, but is still 25-percent lower than it was in 2013, a decline almost entirely of students from within the Hawkeye State.

A shift happening in the Midwest is especially visible in Iowa: Residents’ embrace of higher education as the key to a stable economic future is loosening, according to college officials, school counselors, business owners, and students and families themselves. While a recent Chronicle survey found that a majority in the Midwest and nationally still would advise a family member or friend to get a bachelor’s degree, other data show that high-school graduates are increasingly making a different choice for themselves.

Statewide, the share of students who attend college right after graduating from high school shrank from 69.2 percent in 2011-12 to 58.2 percent of the Class of 2022.

In recent years, the overall number of high-school graduates has been relatively steady, but there has been an increase in students who are racial minorities and from low-income families, two groups that have been less likely to go to college. The situation could get much worse for colleges after 2026, when the overall number of high-school graduates is expected to tumble in Iowa and some surrounding states — making it harder to rely even on nonresident enrollment.

The shrinking enrollment also reflects students’ shifting attitudes and expectations about what they want from a college degree, said Maria Sulentic, a counselor for the West Bend-Mallard Consolidated School District.

In the past, “students were more willing to see college as a way to explore their options and take courses that would guide them on that path,” she said. “Now they’re seeing it as something to do when they know what they want to do and what their end goal is.”

If they don’t see a clear outcome from college that includes a job, Sulentic said, students are going to consider other options, like working on the family farm or at local businesses.

Higher-ed watchers concerned about the so-called demographic cliff often point to the enrollment struggles of small private colleges. But the trend has affected Iowa’s three public universities, too. What’s at stake is not only tuition dollars, but also the universities’ cultural, economic, and political relevance in a state where elected officials have sometimes attacked higher education for, they say, promoting a political agenda over career skills.

College officials are seeking to appeal to students and parents with programs that are career-focused and affordable. But in an environment where a middle-class job is available without a degree, they may also have to explain why a college education is about much more than a first job, and worth the time and cost.

“Everyone likes to look at a singular metric,” said Terri Crumley, director of admissions at UNI. “What kind of job am I going to get, how much money will I make?”

UNI can answer that question, for many of its students. From the ranks of its 7,800 undergraduates come a large majority of the state’s teachers, and a fair number of business and finance majors and statisticians to work in the state’s insurance industry.

While a starting salary of $18 an hour from Bertch Cabinet may be appealing, the median annual salary for people with a bachelor’s degree from UNI in business administration, management, and operations is $61,500; for those with a bachelor’s degree in finance and financial management services, it’s $62,700. Graduates with a bachelor’s degree in teacher education earn $43,000, closer to the statewide median, but a law passed this year will raise the minimum pay for new teachers to $47,000 in July and $50,000 in 2025.

Despite those encouraging prospects, enrollment at UNI has tumbled in recent years. And it’s not just UNI having a hard time attracting students from the Hawkeye State. Total in-state enrollment at all three public universities, which include Iowa State University and the University of Iowa, fell 15 percent between 2018 and 2023, according to government figures. (At the state’s 33 private nonprofit colleges, resident enrollment fell nearly 9 percent, though it varied widely by institution.)

At Iowa’s community colleges, where more than 90 percent of the students are residents, overall enrollment fell 5.3 percent between 2018 and 2023, though the change in resident enrollment was only .66-percent lower over that period.

Why such disappointing numbers? A study by state education researchers concludes that the decline partly reflects an increase in the share of high-school graduates from groups that have been less likely to seek postsecondary education.

The Public-Perception Puzzle

This project examines higher ed’s public-perception problem — and the solutions to it — in our reporting and in an independent national survey conducted by The Chronicle with Langer Research Associates. The survey’s aim is to add depth and nuance to the growing body of research on how people perceive higher ed.

Explore the series.

Between 2012 and 2019, the share of high-school graduates who identified as racial minorities rose from 14 percent to nearly 21 percent, while the share of that group that enrolled in college fell 5 percentage points — from 59 percent to 54 percent. While that is a challenge, the bigger enrollment loss has come from declining college attendance by white high-school graduates, who had long made up a larger share of the student body. Their enrollment share fell from 71 percent to 67 percent, according to the report.

The biggest factor appears to be money: As the ratio of high-school graduates who qualified for free or reduced-price lunches increased from 37.5 percent to more than 45 percent, the share who enrolled in college after graduation decreased 4.6 percentage points, from 51.4 percent to 46.8 percent. By contrast, enrollments by high-school graduates who are not from low-income families have held mostly steady: From 80 percent in 2012 to just under 79 percent seven years later.

As has happened nationally, college enrollment among men in Iowa also continues to fall. White men from low-income families are the least likely to attend college, the state’s study found, while Black men have had the sharpest decline in college enrollment over the same period.

As they contend with Iowa’s changing demographics, college officials are also fighting to make the case for higher education.

The Chronicle’s own poll results show that skepticism about higher education extends throughout the Midwest. While 72 percent of respondents in this region would recommend that a family member or close friend pursue a college degree, across all other regions 80 percent of Americans would make that recommendation.

Among all respondents, 78 percent would recommend a friend or family member seek a bachelor’s degree. Midwesterners were also far less likely than those in other regions to put a high value on colleges’ contributions to the community. Only a third of respondents said college had a positive influence on students’ political views, compared with 42 percent of those in other regions.

At UNI, several students from Iowa said going to college was presented to them as one of several options, even in families where both parents had earned college degrees.

“Going to college wasn’t something I had to do,” said Ashlyn Wilkins, a sophomore from Center Point who is majoring in psychology and sociology. Both her parents completed college degrees, Wilkins said, and were proud of her for enrolling at UNI. But they also would have supported her taking time to figure out her future outside college.

Wilkins and others said a major concern for students and parents was whether college would be worth the price and the debt they might accrue.

Aly Sayre, from Anamosa, was finishing her fifth year of a program to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in accounting. Both of Sayre’s parents earned college degrees, she said, and had an expectation that she would go to college, but “it wasn’t a requirement.”

Among the concerns she and her parents had were the price and the possibility that she, like her older brother, might not finish her degree.

“I knew my parents couldn’t afford to pay for me to go to college, and I knew I didn’t want to be in debt,” she said.

Paying for college is one of the biggest questions for prospective students and their parents, said Kristin Woods, UNI’s senior associate vice president for enrollment management and student success.

The cost of a UNI degree isn’t likely to make headlines: In-state tuition and fees for residents totaled $9,728 for the current academic year and are set to rise about 2 percent for the coming year.

But even students who are several years away from enrolling have latched on to the idea that college is unaffordable, Woods said. When UNI brings groups of middle-school students to campus to promote higher education, she explained, campus staff ask them: “What do you think of when you think of college?”

“Without fail,” Woods said, “we have kids raise their hands and say it’s expensive.”

Mark Putnam, president of Central College, a private institution in Pella, Iowa, with about 1,100 students, said middle-class Midwestern farm families may see less value in the social prestige of a degree than the families he interacted with when he worked at Northeastern University, in Boston. A farm family in Iowa understands the risks and rewards of borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars for farm equipment, he said, but may not see the immediate value of taking on debt for a college degree.

Sulentic, the high-school counselor, said that price is a big factor in choosing between college and a job, as is students’ familiarity with and attachment to their rural communities.

“Sometimes, it just comes down to what they’ve been exposed to,” she said, “what jobs they know that are out there, and what they feel comfortable with.”

Dennis Schilling, who lives in Waterloo, has firsthand experience with a child choosing a job over college. Schilling’s son, Evan, graduated from high school in 2023 and applied to both UNI and nearby Hawkeye Community College.

But a couple of weeks before the semester started, Evan still was uncertain about what he wanted from a college degree. Instead, he took a job at Bertch Cabinet, and is now working full-time and has benefits.

Schilling has a bachelor’s degree in biology from UNI, valued his college education, and said he would do it all over again. But for his son, who didn’t have a clear idea of what he wanted from college, work was a better option, Schilling said.

“I told him to take some time and see what he likes,” Schilling said. “Will he stay in manufacturing? I don’t know.”

Schilling’s son is part of a trend: The state’s study found the share of Iowa high-school students who say they intend to work after graduation has increased over the past decade from 9 percent to 15 percent.

While a college degree has come to represent the best way to earn at least a middle-class wage, a study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that jobs that don’t require a degree are far more plentiful in rural areas than they are in urban areas, with white men especially likely to earn middle-class wages from such jobs.

Several major manufacturing companies across the state offer a middle-class wage. Pella, for example, is home to the $2-billion corporation that makes windows bearing the city’s name, and the Vermeer Corporation, a multinational equipment manufacturer that employs nearly 4,000 workers worldwide. Both companies offer average starting salaries above the state’s median income of $38,000, according to Glassdoor.

Schilling also knows quite a bit about the region’s manufacturing opportunities. He’s the chief executive of a company that makes gearboxes for heavy machinery and leads the Cedar Valley Manufacturing Association, which includes some of the major companies in the region, such as John Deere and Viking Pump.

The association started after the pandemic, Schilling said, when companies in the region were struggling to replace retiring workers and wanted to show the benefits of jobs in manufacturing and how the industry had changed.

In part, the group is trying to demonstrate to parents that manufacturing is not a dirty and difficult job, Schilling said. The association’s marketing materials explain that automation and technology have made it much better for workers in recent decades.

The group has also been working with area high schools and community colleges to provide more information as well as training for students.

“By the time they graduate from high school,” Schilling said, students “can go right into manufacturing and have a shorter training time.”

High-school students can also go to the Waterloo Career Center to get training for jobs like a certified nursing assistant. Schilling’s daughter completed that training, he said, then worked while she took courses to become a registered nurse.

“It’s about sparking that interest,” he said, “so they can get a good-paying job right out of high school.”

Like the regional manufacturers, UNI is also making a deliberate effort to persuade prospective students long before they have to make a choice about what to do after high school.

“It’s a campuswide effort where we’re doing more work to reach out to school districts, middle-school students in particular, and bring them to campus and increase that college exposure early and talk about the college experience and the benefits of college,” said Woods, of UNI.

But if students can get a middle-class job out of high school without a degree, why should they risk accruing student debt for an uncertain future?

Stanley, the human resources director at Bertch, took the risk of going to college and found it wasn’t worth it. She earned a degree in marketing from Loras College, in Dubuque, but couldn’t find a job in that area after graduation.

It was especially difficult to pay off her student loans as a single mother. Then, by chance, she found her passion working in human resources, and taught herself the job.

“I regret not thinking through what’s out there and really wish I could have seen other career opportunities,” Stanley said. “I just saw my dad working in a grocery store, my mom being a nurse.”

At UNI, administrators are trying to make the case that a degree is affordable and relevant for the current and future job markets, and preparation for a fulfilling life.

The amount of federal student debt graduates are accruing is on a downward trend, officials explain, and one out of every 11 graduates complete their degree in three years. A marketing graphic the university created last year shows how those with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, a million dollars more over their lifetime than someone with a high-school diploma.

New degree offerings are designed to fill high-demand jobs in the state. A year ago, UNI added two new degrees in applied engineering and materials science — career paths for students who want to design the parts and equipment made by the state’s manufacturers rather than work the assembly line.

Major employers in the state, like John Deere and Collins Aerospace, have “indicated a need for graduates from both programs,” said a news release from UNI, and “will also provide opportunities for internships and senior projects.”

In the fall, UNI will offer its first-ever degree in nursing, a bachelor of science, to help fill the state’s chronic shortage of health-care workers.

UNI is also seeking to broaden its appeal beyond the traditional high-school student. Pete Moris, director of university relations, said the university’s partnerships with community colleges are meant to reach the very students who chose a job after high school and now want to improve their earning potential.

“We’re seeing folks who maybe went into a trade — they’re working for an electrical company or they’re working for a contractor — and they’ve kind of hit their ceiling, and they can’t move into management or a higher-paying role unless they’ve got a four-year degree.”

UNI officials say they also try to communicate the other benefits of college. “What we are really trying to help every family understand,” said Crumley, “is there’s a lot of other benefits beyond that salary that a student might get.”

Moris said that graduates understand that. “Our alums often report that their UNI experience not only prepared them for a career, but they have also reported healthier lifestyle choices, better financial literacy, and higher engagement in their communities and volunteerism based on their time at UNI,” he wrote in an email.

It’s hard to know, though, how much of that message is sinking in for prospective students — or how clear it is, in the first place.

Crumley said she tries to get them to think about what they want to do outside of the classroom that will enhance their education, such as clubs or study-abroad opportunities. After all, many of them who do enroll will change their major at some point before graduating. “What else are the things that you think will round out your life experience?” she asks them. “And what do you think will help prepare you for the world?”

In that vein, an article on the university’s website touts the newly redesigned general-education requirements as a way to become “a well-rounded member of the workforce and a well-rounded individual.” The requirements, which began in 2022, offer students 150 courses with learning outcomes in areas such as ethics, quantitative analysis, scientific reasoning, and writing.

Despite the promise of a holistic experience, though, UNI’s messaging still emphasizes the bottom line. A graphic shows the upward earning trajectory for a UNI graduate who holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science — “within 10 years, they make over $100,000.”

“The most obvious reason why you should want a bachelor’s degree,” the university explains, “is the earning potential.”