Miguel Flores was excited when he got into San Francisco State University. But after his freshman year, Flores decided not to go back. Reflecting on that decision two years later, Flores says he left because there was “too much focus on partying. I just didn’t spend much time on the academic part of college.” The high cost of college was also a factor, he says, “I wanted to jump into a career and to be more independent, to go to work every day and come home with a pay check.”

Flores is just one of the many students who head off to college full of hope and ambition only to drop out. The number of U.S. students who leave college every year is alarmingly high. A 2021 survey by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported 40.4 million students enrolled in college and left without receiving a degree — that’s up from 31 million in 2014. According to the National Center for Education Statistics only 64 percent of students who entered college in 2014 had graduated by 2020. An update in 2023 produced a similar, but slightly lower statistic: 62.2 percent. In fact, the U.S. has one of the four highest dropout rates in the industrial world, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Why are so many students dropping out of college? Surveys and statistics show the top reasons for this phenomenon fall into these five categories.

Number one reason for leaving college: Cost

A 2023 Sallie Mae online survey, “How American Completes College: Understanding what helps students graduate” conducted by Ipsos, lists “Financial Challenges” as the number one reason why students consider leaving college. Approximately 30 percent of respondents admitted they were struggling to pay for tuition, textbooks, living costs, and food. Fifty-seven percent of the at-risk students reported they were working while in college, and 42 percent said they were getting only poor-to-fair financial support.

The average cost of college tuition is now 40 times higher than it was 60 years ago, while wages have generally stagnated. This discrepancy renders middle and working class families unable to help their children pay for college.

Marcia Zorrilla, a health educator at San Francisco’s Balboa High School, says sky-high college costs are an obstacle for many of her students. Two of her students, for example, were accepted at colleges they couldn’t afford. “They didn’t get as much financial aid as they’d hoped,” Zorrilla says. “In both cases, they wanted to go to a four-year college, and they were really excited to be accepted. But they had to withdraw because their families just couldn’t afford the tuition.” Both students ended up working and taking classes at community college instead.

The high cost of college is especially difficult for first generation college students. Sixty-two percent have doubts that they will be able to pay their college costs, according to data from Sallie Mae.

Number two reason for leaving college: Just not ready

Many other students leave college because they simply aren’t ready to be there. A disturbingly high number aren’t prepared academically. Education Trust reports that close to half of U.S. high school graduates “complete neither a college- nor career-ready course of study.”

As a result, 20 to 25 percent of first-year college students are required to take remedial classes, even though they are hugely disliked — and mis-assigned up to 33 percent of the time. Education Trust’s report describes the experience of a student named Tre, who wanted to be a dentist. When Tre got to college, he learned that he hadn’t taken enough science classes in high school and needed to take a host of remedial classes. “Tre lasted less than a year taking remedial courses before he dropped out. Since dropping out of college, Tre — once ecstatic to be the first in his family to go to college — now bounces around retail and service jobs.” (Read more about why so many top students end up in remedial classes.) Many states (California, Louisiana, Florida) have taken notice and are actively striving to reduce the burden of remedial classes in college.

Other students aren’t emotionally prepared for college. John Duffy, psychologist and author of The Available Parent, has seen an uptick in the number of his teen clients, mostly boys, who come home from college, usually during their freshman year. “The boys I see get overwhelmed by all they have to do, they get anxious and they disengage,” Duffy says. “They stop doing their work or going to class altogether, they drink or smoke too much marijuana, and soon their grades are a mess, and they have to come home.”

Duffy thinks it’s a sign of the times. “As parents we are so focused on their grades, their activities, all the things they need to do to get into college, that we don’t help them learn to regulate their emotions and their time.”

Roger Martin, author of Off to College: A Guide for Parents and president emeritus of Randolph Macon College, says, “The number one issue for college freshmen is time management.”

“They don’t know how to manage their academic work, their social life, and their other activities,” Martin explains.

Both Martin and Duffy see hovering parents as part of the problem. With the best of intentions, too many parents continue to micromanage their kids lives well into high school, so they never learn to manage their time and problem solve on their own. “Step way back,” Duffy advises — let teens talk to their teachers, take the lead on their college applications, manage their time, and make their own mistakes so they build skills and resiliency.

Other experts encourage parents to give teens more time to mature by putting off college for a year. Psychologist Lisa Damour argues, “The upsides of a gap year for all kinds of students have been documented and, to me, teenage years are like dog years: a year of maturation at age 18 is worth at least seven in later life.”

Number three reason for leaving college: Not a good fit

Many kids work hard to get into college — only to find out the school they’ve chosen isn’t right for them. This was the case for Lauren Young, who went to the University of Santa Barbara (UCSB) right out of high school. “It was too big a school for me,” she says. “I found it overwhelming to be in classes with 600 to 800 people.” When she introduced herself to professors after class, they wouldn’t remember who she was a few weeks later.

Sophomore year, Young became increasingly unhappy. Her grandfather died suddenly that fall, and it hit her hard. “I went back to Santa Barbara after the funeral, and I was really down,” she recalls. “The size of the school made it easy for me to skip classes. No one checked on me. I stopped going to class and began falling behind.” She withdrew from UCSB later that spring.

Back at home, she worked as a nanny, took chemistry at the local community college, and looked for a better fit. When she transferred to Connecticut College, it felt right almost immediately. “I’d only been there a couple of weeks when I was walking through the campus with another girl and we passed one of the deans. When she saw us, she did a double take. She said she was really glad that we’d met because she knew we would like each other. That never would have happened at Santa Barbara, because none of my professors would ever have recognized me, much less taken the time to notice that I was new to the school and had made a friend.” Young graduated from Connecticut College.

For many students from low-income families, the range of options are limited. Many teens end up going to a college that’s close to home or fits their work schedule or budget. Public Agenda, a report for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, found that students who drop out of college often chose their college for practical reasons, not because it was a good academic or cultural fit: “Among those who did not complete college, two-thirds say they selected their school primarily for its convenient location, nearly six in 10 because its schedule worked with theirs, and 57 percent because the tuition and fees were affordable.”

Number four reason for leaving college: Counseling could really help

There is overwhelming consensus among education experts that many students don’t get enough support on their college journey — support that needs to start in high school and continue in the first years of college. The reason for this is obvious. U.S. Department of Education data indicates that 17 percent of high schools don’t have a single counselor, and 48 of the 50 states don’t have the recommended minimum of one counselor for every 250 students (the average is 385 to 1). Teens who didn’t get much help from their high school counselors, “were also less likely to say that they had chosen their college or university based on explicit criteria, such as its academic reputation, the availability of financial aid, or the likelihood that it would help them get a good job after graduation.”

After kids get to college, they often need help making the transition. “Advising is critical,” says former college president Martin. “I think advisors should be meeting with students two or three times that first semester, but in many cases, freshmen are left to their own devices.” Martin argues that colleges should do more to engage freshmen and sophomores academically. At many schools, first- and second-year students spend a lot of time in huge, lecture-style general education courses. In an article for Inside Higher Ed, Martin writes, “In far too many exit interviews I have seen, dropouts say that they found their first-year classes meaningless.”

That rings true for Miguel Flores, who left college after his freshman year. “It’s a recurring theme for many of the other kids I know who left college,” he says. “They have to take general ed courses that are a lot like the classes you take in high school — it feels like a waste of time.”

Number five reason for leaving college: Emotional stress and mental health

A 2023 Gallup poll listed “emotional stress” as the number one reason college students dropped out (50 to 53 percent) with “mental health” listed as the number two reason (41 to 43 percent). Only 29 to 33 percent cited cost as the primary reason, a conclusion very different from the Sallie Mae survey cited above.

Many of the students named “coursework difficulty” as a major factor in their mental and emotional struggle, and 21 percent of Black students and 14 percent of Hispanic students claimed they lacked a sense of belonging, or they felt discriminated against at school.

First generation college students also experience extra anxieties, suggests Diana Adamson, executive director of ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that helps first-generation students and students from low-income families get into and stay in college, cites other, subtler factors.

Parents who didn’t attend college may not know how to encourage their child when they face normal first-year doubts and jitters. “It’s scary for parents to see that their child is unhappy and in this unfamiliar place, and they may naturally just encourage the child to come home,” she says.

First-generation students also often feel out of place in the rarified college atmosphere, where many of their peers are from more privileged backgrounds. Support and community make a big difference, Adamson says, and a growing number of colleges are recognizing this and providing comprehensive support programs for first-generation college students and those from low-income families.

“The first year is critical,” Adamson says. “You see a lot of kids falter that first year, but if they stick it out, most of them end up doing really well.”

Going back

In the two years after Miguel Flores dropped out of college, he got the job he thought he wanted: a carpenter making decent money. Although he thought the trade would jumpstart his future, he found himself rethinking his plans. “I don’t see myself doing this as a career,” he says. “I do the same thing every day: cutting plywood, nailing it up, remaking things people screwed up on. It gets boring. Carpentry is good money for someone who just steps into it. But it takes a toll on your body.”

Flores plans to go back to college. This time, he says he’ll take some classes at community college, then he hopes to transfer to a state college in southern California to study economics. “I see the reason for going to college much more,” he says. “Now that I’ve been out in the work world, I realize what’s out there if you go through life without a degree.”