It wasn’t so many years ago that higher education in the U.S. was a growth industry. More and more people were enrolling; schools were expanding; money was rolling in from tuition, gifts, and the government. Obama lectured us that we needed still higher percentages of people with college credentials to keep up with other countries.

Today, the happy talk is mostly gone. College officials worry about falling enrollments while graduates lament their mountains of debt that they can’t repay from their earnings at jobs that don’t really call for more than literacy and trainability.

Reflecting on the state of things, Professor Richard Vedder ponders the decline and fall of college in today’s Martin Center article:

A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Belkin in late March. That revelation was inspired by the results of a survey of over 1,000 adults by the highly respected research organization NORC (formerly National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, in conjunction with WSJ.

Worse yet for colleges, the proportion of Americans with unfavorable assessments of an undergraduate degree’s worth has been rising steadily and rather considerably over the past decade and probably longer. A decade ago, an already worrisome 40 percent thought colleges were “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.” Now that proportion has risen to 56 percent.

Vedder finds similarities between the situation in American higher education and the late Roman Empire. But perhaps we can avoid the fate of Rome.