Author Topic: The incredible shrinking future of college  (Read 270 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline jmyrlefuller

  • J. Myrle Fuller
  • Cat Mod
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,326
  • Gender: Male
  • Realistic nihilist
    • Fullervision
The incredible shrinking future of college
« on: December 04, 2022, 01:45:19 am »
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23428166/college-enrollment-population-education-crash

The population of college-age Americans is about to crash. It will change higher education forever.
by Kevin Carey
November 21, 2022

In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”

The baby boom meant that by the 1970s, campuses were bursting as the children of midcentury fecundity reached early adulthood and women increasingly sought degrees in professions that were finally opening up to women. This put college leaders in a difficult spot. In the short term, they needed dorms and classrooms and teachers to handle the boomer wave. But birth rates had been declining for nearly 20 years, and they saw what that would mean for them in the near future. (...) Higher education was saved by tectonic shifts in the labor market. As predicted, the number of high school graduates declined, from 3.1 million in 1976 to 2.5 million in 1994. But college enrollment rates actually increased, driven by deindustrialization and the collapse of well-paying blue-collar jobs. In 1975, the percentage of high school graduates who chose to immediately enroll in college was only 51 percent. By 1997, it was 67 percent.

Colleges found themselves in the extraordinarily lucky position of being the only places legally allowed to sell credentials that unlocked the gateway to a stable, prosperous life.

Then everything went to hell.

TheThe immediate effect of the Great Recession on higher education was financial. State tax revenues cratered, and university budgets were slashed. From 2009 to 2012, Pennsylvania cut public funding for higher education by more than 19 percent, some $430 million. Nationwide, state funding for college dipped by 9 percent.

But the global financial calamity also created a bomb with an 18-year fuse: Birth rates immediately reversed course and began to plummet. From the early 1970s until 2007, the number of annual births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 stayed between roughly 65 and 70. Starting in 2008, the ratio went down, down, down, to 56 in 2020, the lowest rate in American history. There were 4.3 million births in 2007; last year, there were 3.7 million.

Some parts of the country are already experiencing an enrollment bust, mainly because of internal migration. According to the census, 327,000 people moved to the Northeast (which includes Pennsylvania) from elsewhere in the United States in 2018-19, while 565,000 moved out, for a net loss of 238,000 people.

(heavily excerpted)
New profile picture in honor of Public Domain Day 2024