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One angle that isn't discussed here (because I'm not sure it's relevant yet) is that there will soon be fewer college age kids. As the number of young adults decreases, colleges will either realign to enroll less qualified individuals or they will close. For now, that outcome has been staved off with immigration. But the good times will not last forever.
Is there a large population of people who would go to college but were rejected from every college? People in Community College are basically this demographic, right?
So that number seems to be going down. Is it going down because institutions have lowered their requirements? I don't know. I think this is what we'd see if it was, though.
Community college has cheaper tuition, and it’s more compatible with an existing house/kids/job. So you’ll get people who could have gotten into state schools, but couldn’t or wouldn’t go. Not sure how the percentages stack up.
I’d like to see the pre-COVID numbers for two-year colleges. I suspect the pivot to online offerings closed some of the gap. Less reason to settle for the shorter degree if they’re both being run from your guest room.
A significant percentage of people in community college are also training for things that are not normally four year degrees- some of the less prestigious healthcare specialties(think phlebotomy etc), lots of trades careers, etc. This is simply a different market from what a university is offering, and the alternative to a community college for these things is a for-profit technical school, not a university.
I don't know how much this explains, but the guy working on his ASE certification(automotive mechanical) who has to take a few gen ed credits to get through the program, and the girl working on her LVN who needs to take a few math and general science classes as part of it, would probably not otherwise be going to a university.
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The chart in the link showed it started going down before COVID, around the time we hit peak 18 year old
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And why can't that continue for many, many years to come? People use hyperbolic talk about recent immigration with terms like "flood," but we, particularly in America, have not seen anything like what an actual flood of immigrants would look like.
Let's think this through.
First, it seems like some people are kind of not-friends with the United States. How many Chinese spies are here on Student Visa? How many future ISIS agents are we educating right now? Even without deliberate malice, different norms might lead to people smuggling dangerous fungi and genetically modified roundworms without safeguards, for instance.
Ok, but even if everything is sunshine and rainbows, how does this work out in practice? The majority of students in the US are only able to attend due to generous student loans available. There are people around the world who are able to afford the sticker price on an American education, and they send their brightest to us. But with the demographic collapse we're talking about, eventually we'll run out of rich kids and start needing poor kids. Are they going to be receiving unbacked loans to go to American schools? When they can just fuck off back to some jungle and laugh in the face of debt collectors?
Either we need a more explicit Indentured Servitude pact for college or this isn't starting to look like a solution either.
You're assuming the people who want to keep the colleges and their enrollment numbers propped up care about this.
Yes, and yes, because the "unbacked loans" will mostly be from the government, so it'll be the citizenry eating the costs of the defaults — either through taxes, or more likely via inflation, since the money will just be printed. In short, it'll provide a scheme for the government to keep these institutions afloat at taxpayer expense without just doing so directly, while also furthering demographic replacement.
Ah ok. I've been arguing that it's not a good idea or sustainable and you've been arguing that it's physically possible (for now).
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The indentured servitude pact still doesn’t account for Earth’s inevitable immolation in the expanding Sun.
If you want to write something off for failing “eventually,” you’ve got to be more specific.
I thought it was very specific - if we give forigners unsecured loans for education they will just go back home without repaying them unless we actually indenture them and force them to stay to pay off the debt.
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Enrollment should go down purely on account of the fact that we have far too many people enrolled already. There are ‘way’ too many kids in higher education than there should be.
I don’t think the major universities or even community colleges will likely close. Maybe their endowments should change. Some commitments these institutions have put upon themselves may have to be rolled back as a consequence of them perhaps being involved in programs and outreach they shouldn’t be involved in. But I doubt it’ll be a closure similar to what people have worried about, with libraries closing for instance because of the digitalization efforts and also a far smaller population of readers (which is sad).
There is probably a minimum number of kids a college needs to maintain the facilities they have already built. If a college with dorms and lecture halls to support 10,000 students over the course of a few years suddenly only has 5,000 students apply, they are going to have to try to give away property to avoid going bankrupt. And that's ignoring administrative bloat, post docs, etc.
The top 20% of schools would see the same number of students apply and they are selective enough there wont be much change. The next 20% of schools might need to start accepting people they wouldn't normally. The bottom 20% of schools will start to see fewer kids apply, because all the kids they used to get are applying and getting into the second quintile of schools. And so on as demographics collapse.
The alternative is to admit foreigners. But even foreign demographics will collapse eventually.
I'm really looking forwards to the buddy comedy movie about the chinese exchange student who goes to howard because his english was bad enough to confuse it for harvard....
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Already starting to happen -- see Figure 1 near the end. The top quintile will probably do fine, and the larger schools in the next quintile (which is so far unaffected) can probably "build down" by consolidating campuses and programs. Schools lower than that and not part of a system don't have a clear path to survival; it seems inevitable that many of them will not survive.
I know at least in New York State, community colleges are already in trouble. I don't think any have closed but at least one lost its campus and had to co-locate with the nearby SUNY school.
ETA: See here for about how I expect this to go with most state university systems.
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Certain parts of Sub-Saharan Africa look like they're holding up for now, and if their demographics do eventually collapse, it probably won't be any time this century.
Random Chadian peasants will not be going to American universities, or anywhere else more than five miles from their mud huts. The TFR of the African Elites who might go to university abroad is still collapsing.
Why not? Just create a program to recruit them, ship them over, and waive admissions requirements.
Ah, yes, I look forwards to the universities acquiring translators for a dialect which can only be learned verbally, sending recruiters to deep backwater villages that pay tribute to warlords who themselves owe allegiance to military juntas that don't bother to develop infrastructure to access the deep interior of the country. It might bring universities to develop zeppelins to deliver their recruiters places roads don't reach. Assuming local dictator #500 allows them to do it, and stays in power long enough for it to make any difference.
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Bailouts for the education-managerial complex are always highly relevant.
In this case, bailing them out means "the government aids in forcing everyone they can into paying their salaries".
This is the primary driver for credentialism (and more recently, for handing out student visas like candy in countries with semi-private university systems). Legal requirements are a form of [corporate] welfare, it's just that corporation is a union of a large cross-section of society. And yes, it obviously robs the youth of valuable time and money to pay professors and administrators who have no business being there in the first place, just like everything else society does.
I expect other New World countries to nationalize universities as enrollment falls to enshrine the welfare program permanently.
Are there many near-financially-failing public (state/city) schools? I would expect the upper half of the university system to do okay regardless of student applications dropping. The failing schools will be the ones already struggling to put butts in seats, and I'm not sure exactly which those are. A number of small liberal arts schools have already folded. Are there borderline state schools unable to fill classes?
The most high profile example of this that I'm aware of is up in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania State University is not exactly a state school, but it is one of the "big three" schools that are affiliated.
Three years ago they announced a hiring freeze. It's nominally still active at the end of 2025. I know some people who work there who say that their teams have been reduced by more than half simply through attrition.
Earlier this year, they announced that they will be closing seven of their branch campuses. Students who are still attending them will be given financial assistance and priority admission to attend other schools.
The enrollment cliff is real, and it scares the hell out of higher ed administrators.
Sources: Hiring freeze, campus closure
However: This document indicates that each of the seven satellite campuses being closed had fewer than 800 students. The dire situation at those satellite campuses doesn't really reflect the university as a whole, whose main campus enrolls 49,000 students and has not seen its enrollment fall over the past ten years.
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