Nebraska’s community colleges are seeing steady growth, while traditional four-year college enrollment is largely plateauing.
Last year marked the fifth consecutive year that enrollment was up for first-time freshmen at the state’s two-year schools, according to Nebraska’s Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education.
In Lincoln, Southeast Community College has seen an even larger increase. Its student body has grown by 10% since the pandemic, about 2,500 students, driven primarily by a hunger for vocational schooling.
Joel Michaelis is the school’s vice president of Instruction. He said there are multiple reasons for the boost, most prevalently the rising costs of higher education.
“They’ve heard about the rising cost of higher education, and yet, education’s gone up, but wages haven’t gone up the same,” Michaelis said.
He added that students have also become wary of the time it takes to see a return on the investment of a typical four-year undergraduate degree.
“They’re thinking, ‘It’s not just the money that I’m spending on going to school, it’s the time I’m spending in school.’ They’re not only spending money to do that, but that’s time they’re not earning money," he said.
Tuition and fees at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have risen about 27% over the past 10 years for in-state students, from about $22,000 a year in 2015 to more than $28,000 a year in 2025.
While tuition and fee costs have gone up a similar percentage at the state’s community colleges, they remain much cheaper.
Another reason that could be sparking the drive toward the trades, Michaelis said, is that the current generation of Nebraska students want to earn a paycheck while gaining skills, something that doesn’t necessarily happen in the traditional college setting.
“We call it ‘earning and learning,'" Michaelis said. “Students could want something that takes less time, less money, and still provides a comfortable and satisfying career.”
He added that as the job market becomes more and more competitive, an undergraduate degree doesn’t necessarily guarantee a higher-paying job; it loses some of its prestige.
“I think it’s quite possible that getting a four-year college degree is less the status symbol than it once was," Michaelis said.
Many community colleges offer training paths that allow students to earn money while they study, take much less than four years to complete and also nearly guarantee a relatively well-paying job in a given field upon graduation.
Michaelis believes that’s a huge draw for high school graduates, as it answers one of the most difficult two-word questions that every student faces: “What’s next?”
“If you can be here for two years, and we give you the skills you need for programming, automotive tech, welding, you name it, and you can walk out with a job that pays sixty to seventy thousand dollars a year? I think that’s a pretty good investment," he said.