This paper was originally presented at the 35th annual MN Lutheran Free Conference, Oct. 29, 2022, at Redeemer Lutheran Church, St. Cloud, MN.
In this talk, I want to show that the issues that drove the first generation of Lutherans to reform their universities in their day are (mutandis mutatis) the same ones that we have in our day, and that their solution to these issues should be ours. I’ll be focusing on one particular theme of the Reformation that was central then, not only in word but also in deed, and has to become central now in our day again. That is the focus on the three estates: the church, the home, and civil government. Preaching in the church, education in the schools, are meant to prepare for life in these estates. The state and the home no less than the church depend on this kind of preaching and education. The sad state of the family in our day, the shrinking of churches which is directly related to the sad state of the family, and the growing political anarchy and destabilization of our civil affairs—these are failures, in the end, of education. And the solution is right before us in a renewed commitment to the biblical preaching and classical teaching of Wittenberg.
Herman Sasse, in his great little work translated into English as Here We Stand goes through all the different candidates for the real meaning of the Reformation. Was Luther a great political revolutionary, a nationalist leader? Was he a great social reformer? Was he a hero, an inspiring personality who founded a movement based on the force of his character? Sasse of course dismisses all these interpretations and tells us that Luther is the great confessor. The Church of the Reformation is founded not on a man, but on his confession, the same confession St. Peter made—You are the Christ, the Son of the living God—the confession on which Christ swore He would build His Church and the gates of hell would not prevail against her. But the confessor does not simply direct his confession to the church. He addresses his confession also to families and to the state. He may not be a political reformer or a social reformer, but he is confessor both to home and to government. And so Luther stood before kings. He gave advice to rulers on how to rule and what laws to make. He told soldiers how to serve with a Christian conscience. He taught fathers how to lead their homes with God’s Word and mothers to see their calling to keep the home as the highest calling imaginable. Melanchthon states in the Apology IV.264, “That is no strong faith which does not show itself by confessing”—confessing in the church, confessing in the home, confessing to the state. Sasse is right to point us to confession as the heart and soul of the Reformation, but we are wrong if we think that that confession can be confined within the church and not overflow into all aspects of life, into all three estates.
In the year 1520 Luther published three great works setting forth the reformation needed in the Church. We call it the Reformation of the Church, but there is no separating church from the state or the home. And Luther’s three great works of 1520 make this clear. The first is his “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” which addressed the state, the rulers in Germany, and called on them to rule in accord with God’s Word and to protect the teaching of the Gospel. The second is the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” which addressed the corruption and abuse in the church itself—the sacrifice of the mass, in particular. The third is “On Christian Freedom,” which addressed the Christian’s life and conscience, how the Gospel frees him to live for his neighbor in home and in the society of other people. In other words, his three great works, which became blockbuster hits and traveled rapidly throughout Europe, these three works address the three estates—the church, the home, and the government. This was no accident. The Reformation was not simply a movement to address particular church doctrines and to fix the corruption within the church—stop sacrificing the mass, stop using only Latin in the liturgy, end the sale of indulgences, start preaching Christ crucified. No, Luther could not, and we should not, separate the reform of the church from the reform of family life and society and the government itself. And at the center of this is the reform of education.
Luther says as much in his preface to the Small Catechism. We make our confirmands memorize the Small Catechism. It would be great for them to memorize the preface too, or at least just the following paragraph. Here he is speaking to pastors:
In this matter you should especially urge magistrates and parents to rule well and to send their children to school. Show them why it is their duty to do this and what a damnable sin they are committing if they do not do it. For by such neglect they overthrow and destroy both God’s kingdom and that of the world. They act as the worst enemies both of God and of people. Make it very plain to them what an awful harm they are doing if they will not help to train children to be pastors, preachers, clerks, and to fill other offices that we cannot do without in this life. God will punish them terribly for this failure. There is great need to preach this. In this matter parents and rulers are now sinning in unspeakable ways. The devil, too, hopes to accomplish something cruel because of these things.1
You see the weight Luther puts on a good education. Neglect of giving it to the youth is a damnable sin. It overthrows both God’s Kingdom and that of the world. All the estates—church, family, the government—all are overthrown by lack of good education. And the education Luther has in mind is what we today call a classical, Christian education, an education that prepares someone not just for some specialized job, but for life as a Christian in church, home, and state, as a husband or wife, as a father or mother, as a citizen and asset to the economy and society of his city and nation. It is both an education of the mind—teaching knowledge and skill—and an education of the soul, teaching Christ and virtue. So Luther stresses the harm parents and magistrates are doing in not training children to be pastors, preachers, clerks, and to fill other offices that we cannot do without in this life—this encompasses all three estates.
Luther saw the same problem in his time as we have in ours. Education was not directed to training people for life in the home, church, and state. He had the courage and vision and God-given opportunity to do something about it. It is my constant prayer that God give us the same today.
The over-specialization of education is typical in the advanced stages of a society. Greece saw it, Rome saw it, Luther saw it, we see it today. Consider the teenager in the United States, who cannot look you in the eye and have an intelligent conversation, and then compare that with his dexterous ability to use his iPhone, and you’ll get the point. Consider the surgeon, who is very good at cutting into your body, but in the office looks at his shoes as he sputters out technical medical jargon his patients can’t understand. That’s overspecialization.
In Luther’s time the vast majority of Germans were illiterate and unschooled. They were peasants or they specialized in a trade. The small minority studied in school geared toward a specific white-collar position—professor, doctor, lawyer, and especially, to become part of the priestly class, a monk or friar or priest. None of this education was meant to prepare you to live out life in the three estates. In fact, it had the opposite effect in most cases.
If you are a peasant not expected to learn to read at all, or if you are learning a trade and never learn poetry or proverbs or moral stories or Bible histories or hymns, you won’t be passing moral and biblical instruction on to your children. You won’t understand what is going on at church. You will be helpless to respond to problems in the government and in the state. Luther bemoans the fact that people can’t even recite the Lord’s Prayer or repeat the Ten Commandments or confess the Creed, much less tell you who Moses is. Some of the pastors are as uneducated as the laymen, so that Luther tells some of them just to read his sermons on Sundays if they can’t figure out how to do it themselves. The rate of illiteracy was close to 95% of the populace. If you think of the three estates biblically and listen to what God says about them, you’ll see what a horrible corruption had invaded the church, the state, and the home. “Fathers, bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). How does an illiterate father, and not just illiterate, but ignorant even of the basics of the Christian faith—the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Our Father, the Bible stories—how does he bring up his children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? “Speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19)—how can these songs ring out in the home or the church when no music is taught, no hymns sung in the vernacular and memorized? “Learn with all submission” (1 Tim. 2:11). How can you learn in church when you can’t understand the language of the liturgy or the concepts in the sermon? An educational system that robs people of this basic education destroys, as Luther says, both Kingdoms, encompassing all three estates—the home, the church, and the state.
Turning to the university, the teaching of theology was over-specialized and focused not on Greek and Hebrew, not on biblical study, not on the actual sources of the faith and the greatest works of antiquity, not on communicating faith and morality clearly to the people, but on theoretical philosophizing based on secondary and tertiary sources. This education was positively anti-family and anti-church. Luther’s own life shows this. He never stopped repenting of disobeying his father, dropping out of law school, and going instead to the monastery to study. He had defied the Fourth Commandment and dismissed the family estate in favor of a manmade religious tradition. This is exactly what Jesus blames the Pharisees for doing: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!” (Mk. 7:9). In fact, in becoming a monk, Luther not only disobeyed his father; he swore off marriage, swore off the family estate and the civil. The holy order was monkery, not marriage, the priest not the prince.
And the churchly estate was falling to ruin because of this education also. The work of the monks and the work of the priests, their prayers and their sacrifices of the mass—these were supposed to be far more important than the people actually attending church, being taught God’s Word clearly, and receiving the Lord’s Supper. Thomas Aquinas insisted already in the 13th century that receiving the Lord’s Supper only benefits you the one time you take it, which is at most once a day, but the sacrifice of the mass benefits everyone as many times as it is sacrificed. Education for the churchly offices was therefore not only anti-family and anti-government, but anti-church, as even a seven-year old child knows that church is the gathering of the saints to hear the Word of God (cf. Smalcald Articles, 3.12.2) and not the private prayers and works of monks and priests in their cloisters and side altars.
We see the same disregard for the three estates in the educational system today, with the same results. The government schools and very many religious schools do not make it their aim to prepare the youth to be husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, patriotic citizens, and faithful members of the Christian Church. This is not in their mission statements. They want to prepare people to enter into the workforce, maybe. And they teach them to identify themselves not in relation to the three estates—to God, to family, to country—but in relation to their inner desires.
The public elementary school across from my church just put up a new digital sign, which I have to see every time I drive to church. It flashes the words: “You are unique. You are essential. You are known. You are a hero.” Notice, it does not say, “You are an American. You are a Christian. You have parents who love you. You need a Savior.” It focuses the children on whatever unique characteristic they might have in themselves and encourages them toward expressing their own individuality, or, as we hear so often in the leftist echo chambers, discovering their own truth. This has been the philosophy of education pursued in our schools for generations, with roots all the way back to Rousseau and the French Revolution, but first vocally championed and implemented in our country by John Dewey at the beginning of the 20th century. Dewey, a thorough-going Darwinist, imagined that knowledge cannot be imparted from outside a person through the teaching of objective truths anchored in a created order. Instead, knowledge had to be gained actively by learners as they interacted with their environment. This denial of the created order and stress on experience has led to the contemporary insanity of educational theory, where the point is to get the student to authenticate himself or herself or zerself. And this has gone so far as to include allowing and encouraging students to identify as the opposite sex or even as cats (putting litter boxes in the restrooms at elementary, middle, and high schools). The eschewal of education directed toward the three states leaves people to descend to bestial levels, which fits well with Luther’s frequent complaint against his fellow Germans, who, he said, live like pigs and don’t know what it means to be a human being. This is, as Luther says, the destruction of both God’s kingdom and that of the world.
When you look at university education in our day, you see much the same thing, but both the radical individualism and the career-oriented emphases are magnified. The over-specialization of our universities trains men and women for a particular career. We have simply grown to accept this. And this shows our unspoken priorities. It shows how deep mammon-mindedness has sunk into our psyche. If you contrast the way Luther or Melanchthon or Caspar Cruciger or even Erasmus spoke about the purpose of education with the way we speak of the purpose of college, you will see the difference of night and day. They consistently spoke of the need for a good education for the good of the church, the family, and especially the state. Never will they talk about making money as the ultimate goal. Education is to train a person for life. And life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions. Making money is certainly part of life. The worker is worthy of his wages (Lk. 10:7). If a man does not work, neither should he eat (2 Thess. 3:10). Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need (Eph. 4:28). But preparation for career is only one aspect of education, and even then, career is for the sake of the family, for the sake of the church, for the sake of the community. Education is for life lived in the three estates. It is moral insanity to teach knowledge and skill without teaching to what end that knowledge and skill should be employed.
The problem with the educational system of Luther’s time, which he and Melanchthon and many others sought to reform, should be seen from this perspective: it failed to educate for life in the home, the church, and the state. The sterile scholastic academies of Luther’s day looked very different from the progressive propaganda mills that our secular universities have become today, but they have this in common, that in service to a false religion they undercut the estates the Creator had instituted. The educational reform at Wittenberg and throughout Lutheran lands, both in preparatory schools and at the university, purposefully turned education away from self-serving scholastic intellectualism and toward the service of the family, the church, and the state. This is the task ahead of us in our day also.
Even before Luther, the need for educational reform was obvious to many. Erasmus, the great humanist of the north, who would become Luther’s fierce opponent in 1525 as they battled over the doctrine of the bondage of the will—Erasmus protested the sterility and uselessness of the medieval, scholastic education system long before the Reformation had begun. And when you read his writings, despite his horrible moralistic theology (and it is horrible), his arguments for educational reform are almost in line with Luther’s. The state needs capable rulers and useful citizens. The home needs obedient children. The church needs capable pastors who can actually teach God’s Word understandably to families and to the state. Here is Erasmus talking to a teacher who is thinking of quitting his thankless job:
To be a school master is an office second in importance to a King. Do you think it a mean task to take your fellow-citizens in their earliest years, to instill into them from the beginning sound learning and Christ himself, and return them to your country as so many honorable upright men? Fools may think this is a humble office; in reality, it is very splendid. For if even among Gentiles it was always an excellent and noble thing to deserve well of one’s country, I will not mince my words: no one does more for it than the man who shapes its unformed young people.2
We see the same stress here as in Luther: teaching children the Word of God, morality, and good thinking makes them a benefit to their country and to the church.
The reforms Erasmus encouraged in universities can be summed up in the phrase ad fontes, back to the sources. Read the great works of the past in their original languages. Learn how to speak well, think well, and live well from the great orators and thinkers and church fathers of the past. Instead of reading competing commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences and tertiary works commenting on secondary works, instead of learning academic jargon that stays in the academy because it is impractical to everyone else in home and church and state, learn what is good for all the estates and learn how to communicate it well through ordered, convincing, and attractive speech. This movement, the humanist movement, was already well on its way by the time of Luther’s reforms at Wittenberg.
But the reforms at the University of Wittenberg and then throughout Lutheran lands were greater than any reform Erasmus accomplished. Luther not only had the pure Gospel. He not only had the courage and resolve and uncompromising bent. He had the prince, he had the Elector of Saxony, on his side. In 1518 Luther asked the elector Frederick the Wise to approve changes in the curriculum at the university, expecting delay and the excuse that there wasn’t enough money for reform. Luther instead got exactly what he asked for. Frederick the Wise was more than happy to fund the curricular reforms. He immediately added Greek and Hebrew to the curriculum of Wittenberg. He tossed out secondary philosophical textbooks and had them read Aristotle’s own writings. Classical authors like Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, and Ovid replaced medieval works on natural science, rhetoric, and history. Literature became an emphasis. Stress was applied not only to the acquisition of knowledge but to its effective communication through rhetoric and logic. Biblical study, lectures on books of the Bible, replaced the stale theologizing of the scholastics. And then Wittenberg began to call new professors, the greatest of whom was Philipp Melanchthon. Joining the faculty as professor of Greek in 1518, Melanchthon soon won the affection and respect of all his colleagues, Luther in particular. His zeal for reforming education at Wittenberg and then around Germany was unparalleled. His teaching from the primary sources was unrivaled. Everyone wanted to hear him. The first time Luther heard him, he immediately asked the elector to give him a raise. We can’t lose Philipp, he said. Melanchthon earned his honorary title, “Praeceptor Germaniae,” Teacher of all Germany, by a ridiculously productive 42 years of teaching at Wittenberg and reforming schools and universities across Germany, until his death in 1560.
The growth of the University of Wittenberg was quick and substantial. By 1521 many students came to Wittenberg only to have to turn back and go elsewhere because there simply wasn’t enough room for them in the little city. Melanchthon would regularly have virtually the entire student body—up to 600 students—attend his lectures. The learning was so exciting that professors would attend each other’s lectures whenever they could.3
When you look at Luther’s, Melanchthon’s, and others’ explanations of their reforms, you see very clearly that their chief concern was for the maintenance of the three estates. Caspar Cruciger, a professor at Wittenberg, says it outright in a speech to the graduating class of 1531, “You ought to keep in mind the purpose of your studies and realize that they are provided for giving advice to the state, for teaching in the churches, and for upholding the doctrine of religion [in the homes].”4 Veit Dietrich, Dean of the arts faculty at Wittenberg, insisted that the study of Greek and Latin language and literature was necessary not only for pastors and theologians, but for all professions and all positions in society. Pastors obviously need the languages and classical learning, but so does nearly every other profession. Says Dietrich, “I declare that those who will be undertaking the study of medicine or law should be educated in advance in some noble teaching that includes philosophy and a knowledge of the ancient world. The practice of public speaking also has to be added.”5 Then, as far as positions in the government, nothing, he says, nothing can happen in either private life or the life of the state for which you can’t find a precedent in ancient history.6 In fact, it’s impossible to understand how to run a state well without seeing how other states have succeeded and failed throughout history. In opposition to the elitist mantra so popular during the Enlightenment,7 the Lutherans consistently argue that we should study the classics not only for pleasure—though it’s pleasurable enough—not only for our own betterment, but out of necessity, because nothing so practically teaches the mind and directs it toward virtue, nothing so benefits state, family, and church, than the study of the classics and the greatest classic, the Bible.
Luther and others warned that it was dangerous, in fact, to allow people to study for a specific field too soon, in particular theology.8 The basics had to be learned first, and that meant the study of literature, history, philosophy, rhetoric, mathematics, music, and natural science. Much as St. Paul insists that a recent convert shouldn’t become a pastor, Luther argues that those who haven’t learned Latin and Greek well, rhetoric well, philosophy, history, and literature well, should not jump to the study of theology. He saw many turn into fanatics this way. Their untrained minds misunderstood the Bible and their uncontrolled zeal led them to rash departure from orthodox Christianity. The Anabaptists and enthusiasts were perfect examples of why a little learning is a dangerous thing. They don’t know how to read texts properly in context, they can’t control their passions, they don’t know how to employ logic consistently, they don’t know their history and so are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Their uneducated study of theology and the Bible led to horrible rebellion against the state, riotous upheaval of society, and serious theological confusion. The Peasants’ Revolt was due to this sort of lack of classical education.
Luther and Melanchthon also dealt with financial problems and the reality of economic pressure in Wittenberg. They needed to fund the university. It has never been cheap. Bringing on new faculty costs money. Changing the curriculum was expensive. By 1524 Luther was terrified that Melanchthon would leave Wittenberg to another university post because he was paid so poorly. Melanchthon himself was thinking the University of Wittenberg might not survive because poor pay was forcing competent professors to go elsewhere. Luther once again approached the elector—by this time, it was John the Steadfast—and once again received exactly what he asked for and more. Melanchthon’s pay was doubled immediately. The other professors were given substantial raises. The fact was that there was no way the Elector was going to let Wittenberg die. It was the greatest university in Germany—the greatest, in fact, in the world. While other universities were losing students, Wittenberg couldn’t contain the number of students who wanted to attend. Wittenberg had captured the hearts of the younger generation with a serious and optimistic educational program that was specifically formed with the goal of benefiting all of society, from the church to the home to the state.
The parallels to our day are obvious. I don’t need to speak of the secular universities—they are failing and will continue to fail, just as the liberal churches are shrinking at an increasingly accelerated rate. The sterility and impracticability of their social and scientific theories are not enticing the serious among the next generation. The expected decrease in university attendance in the next few years is 15%.9 While NPR elites continue to act as if going to Harvard or making it into Yale means something, the brilliant of the next generation are eyeing colleges like Hillsdale or Patrick Henry or Wyoming Catholic College or the soon-to-be Luther Classical College. Wittenberg had to turn away students. Other universities were begging for students. The same is happening today. Not just the secular universities, but the religious universities and colleges that refuse to take a strong conservative stand and commit to a sane classical education, are reduced to begging for students. The conservative colleges, the classical colleges, that take a stand and offer the kind of education that prepares people to live as Christians in state, home, and church—these are beginning to have to turn competent applicants away.
And the financials tell the same story. Concordia Portland, Concordia Bronxville, Concordia Selma all went bankrupt, and Concordia Ann Arbor would have gone under if it had not joined with Concordia Wisconsin. The Elector of Saxony rearranged funding and made sure he could pay the professors at Wittenberg because he knew the education provided there would help his kingdom, would help his people, would help the church. The mission was clear and honest and obviously worthwhile. The donors of the failed Concordias were told no such clear mission. The students flocked to Wittenberg because they wanted a serious and practical education that would prepare them to live life in the home and the state and the church. Students today are looking for the same thing, and they are finding it in classical colleges.
Lutherans are pessimistic creatures; call it the German influence, call it a Norwegian curse. I’m no sociologist and no psychologist, but the fact is that the Reformed have started several classical colleges, the Roman Catholics have started many, and they are thriving. Wyoming Catholic in tiny Lander, Wyoming had close to a thousand applications last year and had to turn down most of them. The classical Hillsdale is down to a 20% acceptance rate, having five times as many applicants as it can admit. People are competing to get in. The last few years have seen literally millions of students leave the public school and begin homeschooling or attending classical schools. Wittenberg Academy, an online Lutheran classical school, has record enrollment. The baby glut amongst the liberals and the birth-control moderates contrasts with a baby boom amongst the conservatives of this and the coming generations who want conservative, classical, Lutheran education.
It is far past time that we start a classical Lutheran college, and that is exactly what we’re doing in Casper, WY in the founding of Luther Classical College, which will be opening its doors to students in the Fall of 2025. But of course a Lutheran classical college will have the advantage that Luther had over Erasmus—the pure teaching of God’s Word and an uncompromising zeal for the furtherance of Christ’s pure Gospel in the home and the church and the community.
We are facing a situation very similar to that which Luther and Wittenberg faced in the early years of the Reformation. We see it especially in the harm our educational system has done to the three estates. But education includes the preaching of the church, which has not taught on the three estates with the urgency and consistency that we see in the Reformation and which Luther in the Small Catechism demands of us. Contrast Luther’s preaching, Gerhard’s preaching, or Walther’s preaching with your typical LCMS sermon in our day, and you will see a marked contrast. The law/gospel reductionism, where every sermon is reduced to a message of “you are a sinner, but Jesus died to take away your sin,” was unheard of among our fathers. Ten-minute sermons were rare then too. The pastors took it as their duty to teach people how to live at home and in society. They took it as their duty to warn them about societal and political evils. The Bible speaks to these things. They are not tangential to the Christian life. Luther explicitly and frequently tells pastors to command magistrates and fathers to rule well. We always preach the Gospel. The Gospel is our joy, the Lord Jesus’ death for our sins our boast, His resurrection to life our glory. But the instruction many of us pastors received that we shouldn’t preach on political items, shouldn’t advise parents how to raise their children in our sermons—this is not only in direct conflict with the teaching and practice of our Church, it is in direct conflict with the instruction of our Lord Jesus and His apostles. Classical education, which returns us to the sources, especially the Bible, keeps us from falling into the ditch of conforming our teaching and preaching to some secondary standard instead of to the very Word of God, which tells us to teach the whole counsel of God.
Classical education in school and college is meant to dovetail with this biblical instruction at church, with beautiful music at church, with great speaking at church, so that these exercises of piety also move into the home and we see their fruits in society. Specialization has its place. The world has to be made up not of doctors and doctors, but of doctors and farmers, as the old proverb says. But a man who is trained in some specialization without an education in literature and letters and music and history will not likely be reading the Bible to his children at home. He will likely be embarrassed or terrified of singing at church. Singing hymns at home will likely be torture for him, nor would it be practical, since he hasn’t trained his mind to memorize tunes or words. He will likely also be more easily deceived by the wanton rhetoric of some pandering politicians. We see this constantly in our congregations. Pastors bemoan the fact that many public-school students attending their confirmation classes can’t read at a level that would ever induce them to actually read the Bible at home. Reading is painful for them. Singing is foreign to them. Memorizing is unthinkable. And they have the political opinions of their parents until they get out of the house, and then anything goes.
The beauty of learning history is that it teaches us what has worked in the past for the glory of God and the furtherance of His Kingdom. Classical Christian education works because it respects God’s order, the whole human being in his God-given vocations in church, home, and society. We have an extremely bright future ahead of us in the Lutheran Church. We don’t need to wring our hands at the closing of failed universities or the damage the devil has done against our families, churches, and states. The Word of the Lord endures forever, and so long as we have it and fight for it, we have everything to look forward to. The renewal of classical education among us must be not for its own sake, or for the sake of intellectual achievement, but for the sake of the preaching of, believing in, and obedience to this Word in church, home, and state.
1 Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, ed. Paul McCain, (St. Louis: CPH) 2005, 314-315
2 Letter to Johann Witz, 1516
3 cf. Gregory Graybill, The Honeycomb Scroll: Philipp Melanchthon at the Dawn of the Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress) 2015
4 Philipp Melancthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, (Cambridge University Press) 1999, 6
5 Ibid., 32-33
6 Ibid., 33
7 Namely, that we should study only for pleasure
8 Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation, 1521-1532, trans. James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis: Fortress) 1990
9 https://hechingerreport.org/college-students-predicted-to-fall-by-more-than-15-after-the-year-2025/
