INSIDE HIGHER ED — Much has been written about the Great Resignation. The sheer scale is obvious: about 25 million workers left their jobs in the second half of 2021 alone. More ambiguous is the downstream impact on the labor markets: Where will people choose to work, how will they prefer to work (remote or in-person) and what will employers do to balance their own needs with the shifting demands of employees? Likewise, higher education’s “great interruption” (our term) has been seismic. The decline in straight–from–high school–to–college enrollment and the uptick in stop outs—already enrolled students hitting the pause button on their educations—has accelerated since the start of the pandemic. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, undergraduate enrollment year over year fell by 3.6 percent in fall 2020 and by 3.1 percent in fall 2021. Total undergraduate enrollment declined 6.6 percent from fall 2019 to fall 2021, representing a loss of just over a million students. In fall 2020, 20.7 percent fewer students than in 2019 enrolled directly in college from high school, and more than one in four students enrolled in college in 2019 did not return the following fall, the highest rate since 2012. As in so many spheres of life, COVID is having an accelerated impact on already concerning trends. For higher education, these sober statistics are acute signals of a decade-long enrollment decline of 13 percent.