DITCHING COLLEGE in 2017, the late Walter Williams reported that about “1 in 3 college graduates have a job historically performed by those with a high-school diploma or the equivalent.” Williams, citing Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, goes on to say that the U.S. was home to “115,000 janitors, 16,000 parking lot attendants, 83,000 bartenders and about 35,000 taxi drivers with bachelor’s degrees in 2012.”

Why not everyone has to go to an institution of “higher learning.”

One of the numerous reverberations of the Covid pandemic and our overwrought response to it is that many young people are now skipping college. For students who graduated from high school in 2020, college enrollment was down 21.7% compared with the prior year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. And importantly, if a student doesn’t go directly from high school to college, he is much less likely to ever attend a school of higher learning. Men notably, in increasing numbers, are forsaking college. The Clearinghouse reports that at the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, and men just 40.5%.