The demographic cliff is not news to anyone who has been paying attention to college enrollment or workforce needs. Nothing can be done about all the children who weren’t born in the last two decades, and it is unlikely that much can be done to improve the birth rate in the near future.
Many colleges and universities are attempting to offset the fall in American students by admitting more and more international students, but this approach has limits. The largest cohort of international students comes from China. Tensions with the Chinese regime will almost certainly mean that the U.S. government will significantly restrict that flow in the near future. Another expedient that many colleges and universities are pursuing is admitting immigrants, including illegal immigrants. But the number of immigrants qualified for college admission is nowhere close to filling the available seats.
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Other options are to lower college standards even further, downsize the number of colleges and the size of the remaining institutions, admit more adult students, support the rise of mega-universities and other forms of post-secondary instruction that by-pass traditional college structures, aim for apprenticeships and direct high-school-to-full-time-employment programs. All of these steps are already happening, and none of them can give comfort to the American higher education establishment. The demographic cliff has to be seen in the context of a whole series of other developments that promise to draw a curtain on the post-World War II rise of mass higher education in America. We overbuilt colleges and universities with the Baby Boom generation in mind and then continued to overbuild these institutions as the following generations bought into the idea that a college degree was a prerequisite for a good career and a satisfying life. Neither was true, but enough people believed these promises that higher education managed to sustain the illusion, even as the price of college grew extravagantly and the reality began to sink in that a college degree per se no longer meant that an individual had achieved much in the way of an education.
At some point, the public was going to re-assess the basic assumption that college was always the best option. That reassessment is happening, and it happens to be happening at the same time that colleges are beginning to struggle with the demographic cliff. I see several positive aspects of this situation.
First, it means that America must get serious about K-12 education, especially secondary education. For several generations, we have let our public schools become playthings for progressives interested in using them to promote faddish ideologies. The schools could do this in light of the willingness of colleges to admit students who have no more than superficial preparation for post-secondary education. But if a high school diploma becomes the terminal educational credential for more and more students, the schools will come under serious pressure to actually educate their students.
Second, it means a weeding out of colleges and universities that are little more than waystations for young people who haven’t yet figured out what to do with their lives. Fewer colleges will not hurt young people or the economy. We will simply foster better ways to match people to real opportunities and resources in a manner that will help everyone.
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Third, the traditional institutions of higher education will have to focus on what sets them apart from the institutions that are primarily focused on job preparation. There is nothing wrong with the nation having good institutions that focus primarily on career skills. We need such institutions. But the four-year college is not the best way to deliver that training,
Maybe this transition will entail a lot of re-branding in which former colleges rediscover themselves as rigorous job-training centers. But whatever happens, they won’t be able to sustain their current business models. The decline in the number of high school graduates, accompanied by other incentives for young people to look for non-college opportunities, will force a profound change in the post-secondary landscape of American education.
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I have long said that higher education is where General Motors was in 1970 when 400,000 United Autoworkers (UAW) went out on strike. When the UAW struck against GM in 2007, there were only 73,000 workers on strike.
In 2019, when the UAW went on strike against what remained of Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers, there was a combined total of 46,000 workers left to go out on strike. Yes, over nine out of every ten autoworker jobs have disappeared, and that’s what is going to happen to higher ed.
As to International students, it’s not going to just be rising International tensions.
A century ago, the German universities were considered the best in the world — and then the Nazis corrupted them, much as our own nazis have corrupted our universities. After WWII, Americans no longer felt the need to go to Europe (and particularly Germany) in pursuit of an education as American universities had grown into a respectable alternative.
China has now rebuilt the universities it destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, India has now built the universities it never had before. Both countries have put a lot of money into this, and their universities are now somewhat respectable in a way they weren’t thirty years ago when we were getting a large number of students from China and India.
And then as to China, it’s an economic mess right now with most of the savings of the middle class having evaporated in real estate developments that (a) were never completed, and (b) built in remote areas where no one wants to live. (Google “Evergrande bankruptcy” although that is only part of it.)
The Chinese parents no longer have the money to send their children to “the states” while there are perfectly good universities in China. What would you do???
Back to the auto industry — in the late ’80s, there was a joint GM/Toyota venture where Toyota Corollas and Chevy Novas were made on the same assembly line and were essentially identical with only cosmetic differences. The line made Corollas one week and Novas the next — identical cars.
And people paid more, considerably more, to get a Corolla.
American higher ed will have a similar problem…
The gleeful prediction of doom for higher education has heard for many years now. It always seems to recede.
The earnings premium for college graduates seem to have stabilized in a range, at a historical high level. This is easily checked on the web.
It’s true that aptitudes such as SAT dipped for the baby boomers. But that was a long time ago. Verbal scores never really recovered. But math scores are pretty just about recovered. Maybe that reflects what people really think is important?
I’ve noticed that highly educated graduates almost always the trade career path, while quitely seeking the college path for their own children.
Of course, certain high political officials seek positions for themselves in places like Yale, Stanford, etc. After which condemning higher education as “the enemy.”
The problem with lifetime earnings is that someone retiring today at age 65 would have graduated from college in 1981 — you are looking at people who graduated in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s when college was quite different from today.
The other thing is that there are factors other than merely “going to college.” You will find a higher SES, higher effort, etc. These people would have earned more in the trades as well.
HOWEVER if you look at those who graduated after 2010, after the Great Recession, they’re not doing better. And as to college as vocational education, that’s how most of them started. Leland Stanford Junior University (named after Leland Jr.) started out railroad, went DOD during WWII, and then Silicone Valley. Yale was formed by Connecticut ministers to train ministers because they were having a doctrinal dispute with the ministers in Massachusetts and didn’t want the ministers trained by Harvard.
Most of your state universities started as Land Grant colleges under one of the Morrill Acts, they had the specific purpose of teaching “Scientific Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (engineering” with some still having “A&M” in their names. Many of the HBCUs started as “separate but equal” land grants under the mandate that if a state’s land grant college was segregated, the state also had to have one for Blacks.
Most of your state colleges started out as “Normal Schools” — initially 2-year institutions to train Elementary School teachers, although my grandmother graduated from one in 1910 with a four year degree. (As late as the 1950s, it was common for teachers to only have a 2 year degree, particularly in rural states where there still were one-room schoolhouses.)
While a lot of parents seek the college path for their children, they do so with a vocational intent. They want their children to have white collar jobs, not to be working at Starbucks.
Hence this is where I disagree with both you and Dr. Wood — with the exception of the sons of the idle rich, college has ALWAYS been vocationally oriented. Maybe it was the concept of “an officer and a gentleman” and making the gentleman as well, but the US military has long had a largely college-educated officer corps — that was part of the Morrill Act and why land grant colleges are required to have Army ROTC.
The institutions that survive will figure out how to provide a valuable education in the humanities while also providing a vocational education that employers are willing to pay a premium for. Smith tried this with its engineering program only to realize that female engineering students are essentially similar to male engineering students, but with better writing skills.