Overpriced, outdated and no longer required by an increasing number of employers, is the baccalaureate in a death spiral? Enrollments at American colleges and universities have been on a decade-long skid. This past year, enrollments dropped by 600,000 or 3.5 percent. While some of those drops may have been prompted by the pandemic, the trend is clear -- fewer and fewer students are entering college. Institutions of higher education have held a self-important, "we know what you must learn" attitude. Colleges and universities specify and require general education studies that must be mastered without timely, regular and deep research and consultation for relevance to societal trends, employer needs and student preferences. One must ask if we in higher education have kept up with the rapid acceleration of social, technological and societal changes in every one of our courses, prerequisites, general education requirements and curricula?
