New enrollments at American colleges and universities hit their highest level in a decade last fall, but a closer look at the type of institution high schoolers are opting for says a lot about what students’ priorities are nowadays.
Over 16 million students enrolled in an undergraduate degree, a 1.2% increase from the year before, according to a survey released Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse, an education data provider.
But that growth came down almost entirely to rising interest in community colleges and undergraduate certificates, where enrollment massively outnumbered that at traditional four-year universities. While the number of new students seeking two-year associate’s degrees rose 2.2%, interest in bachelor’s degrees grew less than 1%.
Overall, community colleges added 173,000 undergraduate students last fall, nearly double the number of new students at public four-year colleges. Private nonprofit universities actually suffered a decline in enrollment, losing nearly 60,000 students.
The report, which covers 97% of post-secondary enrollment across the country, illustrates traditional universities’ ongoing identity crisis while students rethink the validity of a four-year degree. As young Americans grow disillusioned by tales of crushing student debt loads, a tight labor market for entry-level jobs, and the threatening possibility that artificial intelligence might usurp some of those roles in the near future anyway, many are looking into other educational pathways.
One factor behind the divergence is cost. Average in-district tuition at public two-year institutions costs a little over $4,000 this year, while public four-year colleges tend to run in-state students around $12,000, according to the College Board. Universities and colleges tout rising tuition costs as investments into students’ futures, but while most data still suggests bachelor’s degree holders will earn more and face less unemployment over the course of their career, fresh grads are now facing a tough job market to navigate. In September, the unemployment rate for new college grads hit 9.5%, its highest since 2021.
The difficult labor market for entry-level roles has pushed more young people to low-cost alternatives, including community colleges and trade schools, which also surged in popularity last year. High-paying jobs that do not require degrees, such as escalator installation and electrical power-line repair, have gone viral among Gen Z audiences, and associate’s degrees and certificates are often functional pipelines for students interested in exploring skilled trades.
While the National Student Clearinghouse report did not say which areas of study community college-goers tend to opt for, other surveys have found that most students who are not planning on transferring directly to a four-year school favor degrees that will grant them quick entry to the workforce. These include nursing, engineering and information technology.
To be sure, earning a bachelor’s degree is still seen as a prerequisite for most knowledge work sectors. In addition to imparting social and creative problem-solving skills, recruiters still rank GPA and degrees highly in their search for new talent, although recent evidence suggests many companies are doubling down on hiring from top colleges. And alternative hiring pathways to white-collar work might have a harder time gaining traction than advocates claim. A Harvard study last year tracked hiring across hundreds of companies, finding that even when employers tout non-degree requirements in their job postings, only one in 700 new hires without a degree actually benefit from these programs.
For traditional colleges, slowing or declining enrollment adds to a list of financial pressures. Falling birth rates in the U.S. have contributed to a so-called enrollment cliff, a shrinking pool of eligible students that could lead to budget cuts and mergers or closures for less secure institutions. Another headache has been the sudden decline in international enrollment as the Trump administration has enforced strict visa requirements for students coming from abroad.
International students are a significant revenue stream for schools, but the National Student Clearinghouse data suggests the U.S. has already become a less attractive destination. Graduate international student enrollment last fall declined nearly 6%, while the number of undergraduates from abroad grew 3.2%, less than half last year’s rate.
The Nobel Prize medal has always carried a symbolic weight far beyond its gold content, but in recent years it has also become a mirror for political anxieties, presidential legacies, and staggering wealth.
Some critics argue that the Nobel Committee embarrassed Barack Obama by honoring him too early in his presidency, but the Norway-based awarding panel seems determined to keep Donald Trump away from the honor.
And while the Peace Prize remains tightly controlled, the physical medals themselves have fetched up to $103.5 million at auction, underscoring how the committee may say whatever it wants, but these prizes can go to the highest bidder.
When Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, less than a year into his first term, he said he was humbled and undeserving of it. The committee cited his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.” But his subsequent decisions to send more troops to Afghanistan and wage a bombing campaign via drone would darken the glow of Oslo’s optimism. Even Geir Lundestad, the former Nobel secretary, wrote in his memoir, Secretary of Peace, that he regretted the decision: “Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake. In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”
Obama’s successor has been reportedly desirous of the same honor, with reports attributing his lust for Nobel glory as the reason that he slapped India with a shocking 50% tariff, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi disagreed with Trump’s claim that he deserved the Nobel for stopping a war between India and Pakistan.
Similarly, Trump’s apparent desire for a Nobel plays a role in the fate of Venezuela. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, (who was recently in hiding and fearing for her life from the Maduro regime, won the prize in 2025 but gave it to Trump while meeting him at the White House on Thursday.
Despite receiving the award, he gave no indication about plans for holding elections in the country, and the White House reiterated Trump’s assessment that Machado lacks the support to lead Venezuela. Instead, Trump favors Delcy Rodriguez, who was sworn in as interim president.
The Nobel Committee waded in to clarify that Machado cannot give Trump her prize, but Machado told reporters that she did so anyway.
The episodes illustrate a core quirk of Nobel protocol: the title is immovable, but the tangible benefits are entirely in the laureate’s hands.
The Nobel rules leave no room for that kind of pass-the-parcel prestige: the committee alone decides recipients, and prizes cannot be transferred, re-awarded, or post‑facto reassigned for political convenience. After decades of criticism over premature or politically fraught awards, the institution has grown more cautious, keen to avoid any appearance that a Peace Prize could be used to launder reputations already hardened in the public mind.
Yet while the committee guards its symbolic authority, the open market has been less restrained. Over the last decade, Nobel medals have quietly evolved into some of the most spectacular lots on the global auction circuit. The watershed moment came in 2022, when Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov’s Nobel Peace Prize medal was sold to benefit Ukrainian child refugees, blasting past all expectations to raise an unprecedented $103.5 million.
Other medals have followed a different script, revealing more mundane – and more American – realities. Physicist Leon Lederman’s medal was sold to help cover his medical expenses, prompting outcries about the dysfunction of the U.S. health system. “Only in America,” wrote Sarah Kliff of the Physicians for a National Health Program.
The Nobel Committee cannot stop any of this. It cannot undo Obama’s early‑term Peace Prize, and it cannot engineer or block a future prize simply to manage how history will judge an American president. It also cannot prevent laureates from turning their medals into liquid capital, even when the hammer price reaches nine figures.
Massive budget deficits have sent U.S. debt soaring past $38 trillion, but they have also become the primary driver of corporate profits and stock valuations, according to Research Affiliates.
In a recent note, Chris Brightman, who is a partner, senior advisor, and board member at the firm, and Alex Pickard, senior vice president for research, traced the historical trend between the deficit and how earnings are recycled to inflate asset prices.
“In the financialized U.S. economy, each dollar of deficit spending may flow into a dollar of corporate profit,” they wrote.
Annual budget deficits have reached $2 trillion, with debt-servicing costs alone hitting $1 trillion. As federal spending exceeds revenue by wider margins, the Treasury Department must issue greater volumes of bonds.
Much of the money the government raises by selling debt goes into consumers’ pockets, primarily via entitlement payments, which eventually boost profits, according to Research Affiliates.
But for decades, companies largely didn’t invest those profits to expand their capacity. Due to intense global competition, especially from China, returns from U.S domestic production were kept low. And even the money that is invested wound up replacing depreciated capacity rather than expanding it.
As a result, companies returned much of their capital to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends, which were plowed back into financial markets, often in price-insensitive passive funds that inflate valuations, the report argued.
“Mandated to remain fully invested, these funds then recycle the inflows to purchase stocks in proportion to their market capitalization indifferent to valuation, thus bidding up prices without any change in fundamentals,” Brightman and Pickard wrote.
They pointed to a real-world experiment that reinforces their thesis. During the late 1990s, the federal government briefly erased its budget deficit and actually boasted a surplus.
That came as the booming economy helped lift revenue while cuts to federal welfare programs limited spending. During this period, corporate profits fell too, they added.
This dependence on federal deficits has left financial markets increasingly fragile, the report warned, as corporate earnings have shifted away from relying on returns from private investment.
“Reversion to a healthier macroeconomic environment of declining deficit spending and greater net investment may cause sharp declines in both corporate profits and valuation multiples and likely trigger a financial crisis with politically toxic consequences,” Brightman and Pickard concluded.
“Ironically, the more palatable option may be to remain on the current path until a financial crisis imposes on us the discipline that we are unwilling to impose on ourselves.”
Changing U.S. debt market
Despite surging revenue from President Donald Trump’s tariffs, debt continues to pile up, drawing alarm bells from Wall Street heavyweights like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio.
Meanwhile, Trump plans to grow defense spending by 50%, pushing it to $1.5 trillion a year and blowing up the debt even more.
At the same time, the holders of U.S. debt have shifted drastically over the past decade, tilting more toward profit-driven private investors and away from foreign governments that are less sensitive to prices.
That threatens to turn the U.S. financial system more fragile in times of market stress, according to Geng Ngarmboonanant, a managing director at JPMorgan and former deputy chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Foreign governments accounted for more than 40% of Treasury holdings in the early 2010s, up from just over 10% in the mid-1990s, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed last month. This reliable bloc of investors allowed the U.S. to borrow vast sums at artificially low rates. Now, they make up less than 15% of the overall Treasury market.
To be sure, the federal budget deficit isn’t the only driver of growth. The AI boom has set off a massive investment wave, spurring demand for chips, data centers, and construction materials.
But so-called AI hyperscalers are also turning to the bond market to raise capital for annual expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars. And their debt issuance represents more competition to the Treasury Department, which is looking to ensure investors continue absorbing the fresh supply of debt it must sell.
In a note last week, Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok pointed out that Wall Street estimates for the volume of investment grade debt that’s on the way this year reach as high as $2.25 trillion.
“The significant increase in hyperscaler issuance raises questions about who will be the marginal buyer of IG paper,” he said. “Will it come from Treasury purchases and hence put upward pressure on the level of rates? Or might it come from mortgage purchases, putting upward pressure on mortgage spreads?”
In the high-stakes theater of global financial services, leaving a 26-year run at a blue-chip firm for the uncertainty of a pandemic-era IPO would strike most executives as reckless. For Cathinka Wahlstrom, it was instinct.
Now chief commercial officer at Bank of New York (BNY), Wahlstrom’s leap from Accenture partner to the C-suite of the oldest bank in the United States offers a study in modern leadership that blends vision, systems thinking, and comfort with uncertainty.
Her career is defined by inflection points. She left Accenture at the height of her influence. She moved across continents more than once. She declined a role in Japan when her children were young, then later agreed to take a private-equity-backed company public in the middle of a global crisis. Each decision reflected a consistent trade-off between certainty and growth.
Wahlstrom joined Accenture when it was still a partnership grounded in analysis, expertise, and client service. As the firm evolved into a global public company, her role expanded alongside it. What began as deep technical work in financial services grew into stewardship of major client relationships and leadership roles that required her to think across markets, cultures, and organizational layers. She learned to operate inside complex systems where decisions ripple through clients, teams, and institutions.
Over time, her work shifted from solving siloed problems to understanding interdependence and how choices in one area increasingly shape outcomes in another. She could see her future with unusual clarity, including the shape of the work and the progression ahead.
“I could see my next ten years at Accenture,” Wahlstrom says. “And I just knew I was ready for the next thing—even though I couldn’t quite see what that next thing was yet.” That clarity signaled mastery, she says. Staying would have meant optimizing what Wahlstrom already knew, whereas leaving would have meant embracing the vulnerability of a new learning curve.
The opportunity arrived during the pandemic in the form of a chief commercial officer role at a Blackstone-backed company preparing to go public. The opportunity arrived during the pandemic, when uncertainty already defined the environment. Wahlstrom became chief commercial officer of a Blackstone-backed company preparing to go public, moving closer to day-to-day operations than at any prior point in her career. The role tested her in a different register: less advisory and more ownership of outcomes.
That experience set the stage for what came next. When BNY approached her, the challenge was fundamentally different. Founded in 1784, the bank’s defining strength is longevity. Wahlstrom was recruited with a mandate to modernize without destabilizing. Her task was to upgrade technology, evolve culture, and expand the bank’s relevance to a younger client base while preserving the foundations that have enabled the institution to endure for nearly 240 years.
Today, Wahlstrom says she works at the seams of the organization where data meets judgment, strategy meets execution, and global plans meet local realities. One example is using AI to better understand the client experience, surface friction points, and identify emerging opportunities.
Viewed in sequence, Wahlstrom says her career has moved from stability to uncertainty and then to renewal. That arc, she says, reflects what leadership increasingly demands: the ability to live inside paradoxes. Leaders must hold vision and detail at the same time, pair analytical rigor with emotional intelligence, and think globally while acting locally.
“I’m really driven by that journey of setting a vision, coming up with a plan, and then executing,” Wahlstrom says. “I just love the process.”
Politics8 years ago