[timkam]

Observations from overseas (Sweden): possibly because college/university is typically (almost) free of cost and because of Sweden's culture of continuous education, there is an increase in university enrollment applications: https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx. I must say that I like that in times of high unemployment, the "free education" feature allows people to further educate themselves when there are little employment opportunities. IMO, this feature takes the risk burden (that the article is mentioning) off the individual.