The Looming College Enrollment Death Spiral - The Atlantic
Excerpts from an article on a topic that has been discussed on this blog before (see education tag). We have reached (and now passed) Peak Teenager. There will be fewer 18 year olds in each graduating class going forward, and our institutions of higher learning will have to adjust.
The Northeast and the Midwest have the highest density of college campuses but will also see some of the biggest declines in the number of high-school graduates by the 2040s. In all, 38 states are projected to see a drop in the number of graduates. Only 10, most of them in the South, will experience growth.
This article touches on another important aspect of this story. Nearly half of students attend colleges within 50 miles of their home - and these local, lower-cost schools have been losing students to bigger, name-brand schools for some time. These are the schools at highest risk of closing - and their closure can put higher education out of reach for many students.
Applications to the roughly five dozen campuses that accept fewer than 20 percent of applicants have skyrocketed, from nearly 800,000 two decades ago to more than 2.35 million today. ... [T]he top students from Los Angeles and Chicago and Atlanta and Buffalo are now applying to the same schools, where the size of the freshman classes have barely budged since the β70s. And each student is applying to more of these schools.
As they lost more and more local students to national universities, regional colleges found ways to stay afloat. They expanded access for underrepresented groups, added programs and amenities to attract students who might have skipped college otherwise, and partnered with the private sector to reach new markets online and internationally. For a long time, they could count on finding enough teenagers to fill their freshman class.
That era is over. Undergraduate enrollment nationwide has mostly been falling since 2011, even before the demographic cliff. Now, with fewer 18-year-olds in the pipeline, the enrollment machine at local and regional campuses is running out of fuel.
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When enrollment falls, campuses shut down. And when campuses disappear, enrollment falls further, because the local students most likely to attend those institutions lose a nearby option. A vicious cycle emerges, and the worry is that the demographic cliff combined with campus closures will drive the number of college-going students only further downward. βWhen you close the campus, you lose the students who would have gone there,β Hillman said.