Americans have traditionally valued education in general and higher education in particular. Harvard University was founded in 1636, more than a century before the United States managed to birth itself. As our newly formed nation was gelling, North Carolina legislators chartered our country’s first public university, what is now known as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is worth a mention here that an education-hungry young man named Hinton James walked close to 150 miles — you read that correctly — from his home in Wilmington to Chapel Hill to enroll as UNC’s first student. He was UNC’s only student for about two weeks until some others turned up, for an initial 1798 graduating glass of six. A 20th-century dormitory in Chapel Hill is named in James’ honor.

Since young Hinton took his long walk, millions of American families have sacrificed and saved, borrowed and sought financial aid to make higher education possible for those they love. Over the centuries, more and more of us have achieved that goal. Higher education has made us professionals of all stripes, led to successful careers in many fields and enriched countless lives the way only an understanding of the world around us can.

Here comes the challenging news.

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports that about one million fewer undergraduate students enrolled in higher education institutions in 2021 than in 2019. The declines are seen at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, at public and private institutions, at four-year institutions, most dramatically at community colleges and for-profit institutions. The declines are more pronounced among minority students as well.

While a million fewer students over two years is an eye-popping statistic, the trend is not new.

College enrollment has been declining for at least a decade, in part because our nation’s low birthrate means fewer 18-year-olds to enroll at all and because the cost of college continues to spiral. The COVID-19 pandemic, still besetting us in 2022, has merely accelerated the trend. “The reality is that the pandemic has disrupted the education of the next generation of young professionals, and that’s going to have immense consequences on the career options, their livelihoods,” said Doug Shapiro, executive director, Student Clearinghouse.

Shapiro is correct, of course, because educational attainment correlates with lifetime earnings. At the same time, declining higher education enrollment scares the socks off employers looking at fewer skilled workers in their immediate future.

COVID-19 and high costs are apparent factors in the decline, but other factors may be at work as well.In 2013 70% of adult Americans told Gallup pollsters they believed a college education was “very important.” In pre-Covid 2019, only 51% thought so.

Both students and parents are debating the value of higher education compared to its price tags, but is there something more? Something more nebulous and more difficult to pin down?

It is clear many Americans have thrown traditional scholarship and learning to the winds for reasons the rest of us will never know, much less understand.

How else do we account for Covid-deniers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists of all sorts—people who persist in their beliefs and behaviors despite scholarship and scientific evidence to the contrary? How else do we perceive a seemingly growing anti-intellectualism in our nation? I saw a woman on television tell a reporter that she simply did not care about the facts. “I just believe what I believe,” came out of her mouth before an international audience.

We need a visit from Hinton James to help us remember why education is important to us as individuals and as a nation.