Enrollment

[petey23]

On 8/24/2026 at 9:58 PM, thUNDer said:

Big picture is there is much more to the college experience overall for most. A scam it is not but rather a choice, a passion, leaving home, a sense of belonging to a community, meeting your future, without minimizing the achievement to a ‘scam.’ Our measly BS degrees aren’t on either list but we’ll be forever grateful for our time & education at UND. I heard somewhere though that social work is on the rise but I digress 😏

Had a friend in college often say as a large group of people were hanging and interacting, discussing all kinds of topics in our fraterrnity house....."this is college, school is across the street."

[AJS]

12 minutes ago, gfhockey said:

So we are 15 % down?

Year to year freshman class, yes, unless that 2,210 number was taken out of context. Doubtful, but maybe was talking on-campus freshman only. We’ll see, could have sworn there was an article about how applications were up over previous year. 

[Walsh Hall]

23 hours ago, NDinCO said:

I hope there is room for both practical applications and humanities at universities. Practical applications like engineering, medicine, IT, etc. for obvious reasons, but since humans are naturally highly creative and curious, I think subjects like literature, art, music, philosophy, etc. have value. I enjoy reading Shakespeare. The guys a genius. I marvel at the works of Michelangelo. The founding fathers were heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment thinkers; Rousseau, Locke, Montesquieu and others. So yes, the humanities don't provide many jobs or pay well, but I think they are part of our DNA, so some people will want to pursue that. 

I agree that those things are worthwhile endeavors, but whether they are worthwhile higher education pursuits which justify paying many tens of thousands of dollars is quite a different issue. 

[gfhockey]

1 hour ago, AJS said:

Year to year freshman class, yes, unless that 2,210 number was taken out of context. Doubtful, but maybe was talking on-campus freshman only. We’ll see, could have sworn there was an article about how applications were up over previous year. 

Darn how big was ndsu freshman class

[Walsh Hall]

On 8/25/2026 at 11:26 AM, Oxbow6 said:

Copy that Mr. Forbes

I'd be curious to see their methodology.  From my professional experience, several of those are going to be problematic.   At a minimum, there is already a major divergence where senior folks, with the use of AI, can do the work of numerous underlings.  The grunt work which was previously done by the new hires is becoming cheaply replaceable.  There are 5 or 6 of those that I would be very hesitant to encourage young folks to pursue, with accounting being at the top of the list.  I recently saw an AI accounting program demo which scanned and reviewed around 1000 pages of financials and prepared a small business tax return in about 3 minutes.  Of course, the information (at this point) would need to be reviewed, but the net time saving is immense. 

From my experience, any transactional or data driven service is in a major state of flux. 

[UND69er]

3 hours ago, petey23 said:

Had a friend in college often say as a large group of people were hanging and interacting, discussing all kinds of topics in our fraterrnity house....."this is college, school is across the street."

What's he doing today? Can he be considered to be a contributor to society or just along for the ride?

[JakeLove]

On 8/24/2026 at 3:09 PM, UNDDOM said:

Now list the bottom 20 degrees that are worthless... Music, Math, Psychology, Sociology, Arts, History, English, General Studies, Philosophy and Religion and so on.... hence the term 50%.  Yet kids will blow 50K for such degree and not sure why.  

Worthless if you want everyone to be educated to only be mindless functionaries. 
 

the technical professions value these fields of study for the depth they add to project decision making. 
 

devaluing the core liberal arts purpose of a university is foolish.