Indiana students say cost is the biggest barrier to college

Indiana high school students are skipping college because of concerns about costs and uncertainty about what careers to pursue, according to new research from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.

The report is based on a survey of about 2,700 students, parents, and adult learners, as well as extensive interviews with students, parents, educators, and others. The research was funded by a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment.

The survey found that the vast majority of Indiana high school students and their parents believe that training and education beyond high school is important and worth the cost.

"We have an overwhelming majority of high school students and parents of high school students who believe in the importance,” said Jennifer Airey, a founding partner at Heart+Mind Strategies, an outside consultant that led the research. “Those are the numbers we need to be getting in enrollment.”

Indiana has faced a years-long decline in college enrollment. In 2022, the most recent year available, 53% of high school graduates headed directly to college. That’s about 13 percentage points lower than the rate a decade earlier.

The survey found that young adults and adult learners were more skeptical about the value of education and training after high school. About half of those groups said that higher education is worth the cost. Researchers said that White respondents were less likely to favor training and education beyond high school.

“Cost, across the board for all the audiences that we talked to, was a major barrier for college enrollment,” said Demetrees Hutchins, Assistant Vice President of Research & Evaluation at Black Onyx Management.

The other top barriers that respondents identified included “knowing what career path to pursue” and “personal anxiety or fears.”

People dramatically overestimated the cost of higher education in Indiana. The average annual cost of tuition at a public university is about $10,000, according to the researchers. When presented with that price tag, over 80% of high school students and their parents said they believed they could find a way to pay for training and education.

Contact WFYI education reporter Dylan Peers McCoy at dmccoy@wfyi.org.