It's Monday, and the first day of college for many.

• We're diving into the state of higher education.

🌧️ Today's weather: Chance of storms, with a high in the mid-80s.

This newsletter is 988 words — a 3.5-minute read.

Students moving into Kansas City dorms this month are the first college class drawn from a declining pool of high school graduates, per the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE).

Why it matters: Every class after this one gets smaller, and schools that recruit close to home have the most to lose.

By the numbers: The country peaked in 2025 at 3.9 million high school graduates and is projected to fall 13% by 2041.

• Missouri and Kansas will each send 12% fewer graduates out of high school by 2041 than they did in 2023, per WICHE.
• WICHE attributes the decline mainly to fewer U.S. births after the 2008 recession.

Between the lines: Big-name universities recruit nationally. Regional and smaller private colleges depend more on the students around them.

• "You're really concerned about the local demographic," Cato Institute research fellow Andrew Gillen told Axios.

Yes, but: UMKC keeps growing. Fall 2025 was its third straight record year, with first-time enrollment up 2%. This fall's numbers come out in late September.

Zoom in: The metro won't feel it evenly. WICHE projects city schools falling from 31% to 29% of the country's seniors by 2034, while suburban schools rise from 43% to 45%.

What we're watching

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The college diploma is getting a hard reappraisal.

Why it matters: Students today are taking a tougher look at the college tradeoff: burdensome debt and no guarantee of a dream career — or employment at all, as AI threatens the jobs the degrees were meant to unlock.

The big picture: Confidence in higher education slipped among both parties and all levels of educational attainment this year, according to June Gallup polling.

• Job market fears are also surging: Gallup found just 19% of those with a college degree or more said it was a good time to find a quality job at the end of 2025, compared to 35% of those without one.

Yes, but: There's a college confidence paradox: Even as Americans sour on higher education, they keep sending their kids to campus.

• "There is still massive pressure on them from their high schools, the educators at their schools, their parents, their peers, and just the broader culture to still go to college," says The Up & Up founder and Gen Z researcher Rachel Janfaza.

The anxiety isn't new — but the reality is. Today's concerns fall into three big buckets:

1. 💵 Affordability: "I didn't want to take out loans, and I didn't want to put my family through that stress of trying to fund it," says Gabriel Sheahan, a 24-year-old studying welding and fabrication at Lincoln Technical Institute, a trade school in New Jersey.
2. 🏛️ Getting your money's worth: "How does it make sense that you're giving me this deadline to have my degree finished, and I can't even get the classes that I want? I'm in so much competition with all these people. It feels ... like a rat race," Rachel Sukkar, a 19-year-old philosophy major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says.
3. 🎓 Outcomes: "There's just so much volatility, and you can't guarantee the same amount of success that you could 20 years ago with a college degree now," says Moksha Agrawal, a 17-year-old incoming high school senior.

State of play: Vocational and trade programs provide an alternative route.

• About half of KC's workforce is skilled through alternative routes, and more local employers are shifting to skills-based hiring.
• Prep KC and Real World Learning are placing high school graduates on alternative job paths.

The bottom line: High schools and colleges need to adapt to the changing job market, Janfaza says, giving more weight to extracurriculars and soft skills.

🛒 Trader Joe's will open a new store on Shawnee Mission Parkway in Merriam on Sept. 2. (KMBC)

🎬 Heidi Gardner is filming a new movie called "The Swimming Lesson" in and around KC. (FOX4)

• Here's where you can sign up to be an extra.

Some of the tech industry's most influential CEOs have an ambitious message for young people in the age of AI: Skip college altogether.

The big picture: Elon Musk, Alex Karp and Peter Thiel are challenging the four-year degree as the default path for elite talent — and, in some cases, building their own alternatives.

• Critics warn those CEO-backed programs may train young people for a particular role or company without setting them up for success elsewhere.

State of play: Musk, Karp and Thiel have each suggested that four-year degrees are not worth the investment.

• Thiel's Palantir created the Meritocracy Fellowship, which calls for students to "skip the debt" and "skip the indoctrination" in favor of a four-month "Palantir degree." Its first class included 22 students selected from 500 applicants.
• The Thiel Fellowship, which was founded in 2011, pays people to build projects and startups for two years instead of attending college.

Reality check: Americans are still heading to college after high school in droves, data shows, despite a dip in confidence in higher education.

• Education experts tell Axios that company-run alternatives have a fundamental limitation: The skills and credentials may carry far less value outside the organizations that created them.
• These programs are also highly selective — and often attract students who were likely to succeed with or without them.

Zoom in: The University of Missouri–Kansas City is launching a new AI master's degree this fall.

• It also offers an undergrad computer science degree emphasizing in AI, and an AI minor.

Go deeper: College AI use spikes

👹 Abbey loved seeing "Jennifer's Body" at Rooftop Cinema this weekend.

🤨 Travis doesn't know what to do with himself now that "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" is over.

Edited by Chloe Gonzales.