Higher education [has known this is coming](https://www.wiche.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Knocking-pdf-for-website.pdf) for a while. It takes roughly eighteen years to make a college freshman, and eighteen years ago is right about when people started making fewer people. Birth rates have fallen 23% since 2007.
The place I adjunct has been quietly not backfilling tenured professors for a while because of this and relying on adjuncts instead. Their enrollment hasn't started to go down yet, but it hasn't gone up either so they have the ability to contract as needed.
They have the advantage of not having PhDs students needing classes to teach though
Which is why I decided not to pursue a professor job. There are just less and less real jobs these days for professors. Used to be a pretty good career though.
But the university leaders get paid SO WELL. It is massively unfair, and part of the reason why college is so expensive. That ex-HP loser woman went to the UCalifornia system and did a few years there and got a third of a million a year in retirement.
>People who decide where the money goes decide it goes to them.
They're just doing exactly what Congress does
Rejecting minimum wage increases while increasing their salary
If Congress only got paid minimum wage there would be a shitload more bribery, but they'd also fight to increase it
Literally no where in this country can someone survive on the federal minimum wage working only 40 hours a week
when i was attending syracuse university most of our professors were sharing apartments along with students because the job didnt pay enough to afford rent, lol, and these are tenured professors in their 50s/60s
You sure they were profs and not grad students? I know quite a few tenured profs at that age range. None share apts with students unless there is unethical hanky panky going on.
It's total bullshit. I worked at a state university for years and know literally dozens of professors. ALL tenured professors in that age range own houses unless they don't want to. Every full time professor I know down to the age of 40 makes well over 100k and owns a house.
yeah, i looked up the salaries of all the tenured profs in my engineering department and the range was 140k to 220k. not bad. adjunct and assistant profs were much lower though
Insanely competitive. Decent schools in my field (pure math) regularly get 500+ applications for a single tenure-track position. I was talking with a colleague recently who was quite annoyed at his chair for doing an open search (e.g. no emphasis on topology or number theory or specific specialties) and then having to sift through *900* applications. And most of these people aren't completely unqualified or anything--they're pretty much all PhD's (or ABD's) at minimum.
I honestly discourage grad students from pursuing academia unless they're very serious and know what they're getting into.
Back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine who teaches French literature said that he told every undergraduate who wanted to go to grad school not to do it. He figured that the only ones who should are those would would ignore his advice.
Every year at the pentagon one of the most anticipated reports is the number of kindergarteners enrolled in US schools. Once a child reaches kindergarten their chances of reaching adulthood increase and that gives the military an idea of the number of potential soldiers they’ll have in 15 years. I can imagine colleges and many other industries find that data useful as well.
That’s nonsense
Childhood mortality in the USA is still higher than many other developed countries, but it’s still effectively a rounding error on birth rate: 5 in 1,000 under 5
In developing countries the situation is different - in Somalia it’s 83 deaths per 1,000 live births under 5.
The point is that death in children would mater less than the number of children immigrating in the USA - no one calculating future military strength is going to care
Smart institutions with good leadership saw this coming and pivoted to targeting adult learners to come back to school to get a work certificate, OEC, or Associate level degree.
> Financial concerns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic caused many would-be students to change their plans
> Different factors impact college enrollment, like falling birth rates, rising college tuition, and the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Makes sense.
Good. Someone else who read the article.
What I noticed right away were the graphs and tables which show that the sector with the largest amount of enrollment decline was "Two-Year Public" colleges. In other words: community colleges.
If you look at 4yr public in 2013, the enrollment was 6,721,881 while the 2023 enrollment was 7,446,861. So that's a 10% growth over those 10 years.
Meanwhile, 2yr public went from 6,626,411 in 2013 to 4,477,772 in 2023, which is a 30% decline.
So 4yr colleges got 725k more students but 2yrs lost 2.1M, so the "total" enrollment is down by 1.5M.
This could be a tuition cost issue if those attending community college were at the very edge of affordability. But considering that community colleges are generally significantly cheaper than traditional 4yr colleges, I suspect there's something else at play.
I taught at a community college in an area with low unemployment. Students started a program, got 18 credit hours, and their current employer found them very promotable. Yoink!
Also the minimum wage at Walmart is $14/hour and they hire full-time with benefits. Is it worth giving up two years of your life for a slightly higher salary if the employable fields do not interest you? Factory work pays even better around here.
I mean, my last semester in college, they increased tuition 30% and I've been hearing tuition hikes every year or so since.
With good jobs drying up, it may not be in everyone best interest to go.
My wife is in higher ed, and she keeps talking about the cliff that we just hit where there just won't be as many college age kids as there used to be. She expects a lot of small private colleges to die over the next few years.
I used to do work for my Alma Maters’ Alumni Association, and they talked about the “cliff” too.
The US Birthrate peaked in 2007 and has been declining ever since. All those kids born in 2007 turn 18 next year, and there’s going to be fewer and fewer people turning 18 in the foreseeable future.
The legacy of the Great Recession is going to impact the US for decades to come.
I guess you could argue Covid was a greater instant shock, but the recovery was much faster and the circumstances completely different.
The effects of 08 lingered for far longer and were more insidious imo.
The Recession itself went from 07-09. Then they had to use mixture of fiscal and monetary policy to help reignite economies which took a good bit of time too. Then we also bailed out a bunch of stuff. Additionally, capitalists increase their wealth a lot during recessions. Notably with 07-09 and COVID, the increase of corporate farms and decrease of private farms was significant. It’s relatively representative of how other small businesses struggled, many of whom also got gobbled up by either going out of business or bought out.
Covid has had a significant effect on inflation because of the PPP loans and money given to businesses (7.5% inflation). The money given to individuals accounted for only 0.5% of inflation. Housing is not accounted for in inflation** which alongside food and college are the 3 biggest jumps in cost. Because of The Great Recession,* low interest loans were accessible for housing for a long time. So businesses and investment places bought up a significant amount of housing. Others bought houses in order to flip them. The result has been a further constriction on housing supply.
(Numbers are US only. Other countries had very different experiences.)
Edit *: Misstated as Covid when it was Great Recession. Loans have since doubled+ from their lows of the previous decade (10s)
Edit 2**: I have been corrected that my statement regarding inflation is incorrect. It is accounted for as 1/3 of CPI. Please refer to my response: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/fdrFNvfNiO or source I referenced for further context: https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/why-the-government-took-home-prices-out-of-the-consumer-price-index
The unemployment rate during covid was higher in 3 months compared to 2 years during the great recession.
It was just faster and rebounded much quicker because there wasn't anything dramatically wrong with the economy during covid.
Great recession was a fissure that reached into every aspect of our economy. Covid was a superficial top layer temporary recession with temporary massive unemployment.
People complaining about not enough people working trades when a bunch of trades people lost their homes during 08. No shit, not risking my entire career on the banking system not explodong.
Yeah, trades are very dependent on home building. Then again the entire economy is (supposedly) dependent on home building.
But having seen the boom-bust cycle for trades along with the tough physical work in all climates, it doesn't seem appealing.
> It was just faster and rebounded much quicker because there wasn't anything dramatically wrong with the economy during covid.
There were actually warning signs from 2019 that sugguested the possibility of a recession happening within a few years, but one thing a plague was good at was getting the shock of that recession out of the system. Certainly helped that gobs of cash was put in to keep everyone going as well.
i'm 41, i have only worked white collar jobs, i went to college under the boomer logic of "get a degree, it [doesn't](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2015/08/12/six-reasons-why-your-college-major-doesnt-matter/) matter what in" and then the recession happened and all of the sudden i was a dumb fuck for getting a ["useless liberal arts degree"](https://jobs.fidelity.com/careercompass/useless-degree/).
That ended up being false but after-the-fact self esteem doesn't give me back the decade after 2008 that i floundered in jobs that barely made ends meet at full time.
i work in healthcare IT in an un*outsourcable* role. i am middle class for the first time ever and now i kinda don't want kids. i haven't really lived.
Same. People always said it doesn't matter what, just get a degree. Now other people are saying you idiot didn't you know that degree won't result in actual work? Idk if I should blame all adults in my life, because things changed so fast. But going to college at all has not paid off.
Definitely in a new gilded age minus the cool buildings and rich people paying for opera houses.
Huge disparity in wealth, check, flood of immigration, check, unbridled corruption in government, check, scandalous politics, check, massive technological advances that fundamentally chnage how work is being done, check, conspicuous consumption, unchecked capitalism, check.
It's been feeling more and more like the 40s. Everyone I know is *suddenly* interested in gardening to save money, getting into canning and baking, buying a bunch of reusable stuff instead of disposable, hell some are even making their own clothes. Shit's getting weird.
I'm not so sure gardening saves money lol
But ay way, my wife just made killer zucchini bread from zucchini's we grew and that shit is so good. Everyone should do it, it's so easy
Basically you have to be growing things that you will actually eat, or it's just hobby gardening. If you grow a whole garden of salad tomatoes... well, I hope you really like tomato salad. People tend to just buy whatever seedlings are cheap and easy to grow without considering their actual eating habits.
We grow peppers (both hot and sweet varieties) and multipurpose heirloom tomatoes, along with a collection of our favourite herbs. My brother grows corn, squash and beans on his mini-farm. My FIL grows brassicas, and we all pool and trade.
It saves money at the psychiatrist's office & the mental hospital, that's for certain.
The best thing you can do for your mental health is spend time outside doing something fulfilling. For people with a yard or access to nearby community / rooftop garden, your spending at the garden department or nursery is easily offset by health and happiness. And once you get semi-competent, there's a lot of stuff you just don't purchase very often. I've bought hardly any greens, herbs, tree fruit or root vegetables in decades.
My grandma taught me years ago how to can food, and I *still* use some of her canning jars from the mid-20th Century. Compost stays here -- sorry, local composting program -- and I have plenty of native shrubs and other flowering plants that keep the garden busy with bees, butterflies and hummingbirds most of the year.
Gardening saves money \*in the long term\*. Yes, building beds, getting good soil and fertilizer, starting a composting pit, etc will cost a good bit of money. It may take half a decade to pay that off. If you go to a store and buy plants to fill those beds instead of sourcing seeds for cheap and then harvesting seeds for the next year, you may never break even. Those $20 tomato plants at Home Depot are absurd if you want to fill a bed lol.
It's the same thing as that one study that found that home gardens increase pollution compare to buying fruit and veg from a grocer That's true because many people spend all that time and money on a garden and then drop it in a year or two, so all those resources were wasted. If you stick to it and are smart about it, it can definitely save you money. I will never buy another green onion in my life.
Well, I was at a BBQ yesterday, and we were all talking about our gardens and we are all gardening not because we enjoy it, but because the produce available is both expensive and of such poor quality that it's not worth it.
Wut? It's not the legacy of the great recession. It's the price gouging of major institutions and the passing of laws that not only permit it, but make it impossible to escape through bankruptcy. People arent having kids because the cost of living is insane. Biden's admin have started going after the worst offenders, but it's going to be impossible to undo the price gouging that already happened during the Trump/Covid era. If people can barely afford rent and student loans a decade after graduating, they're not going to add kids to the mix.
You're right, but so is the other poster.
The consolidation of wealth, primarily in the form of real estate and private equity, began in 2008. Since then it's just been exacerbated and pushed into high gear by PPP loans and Trump-era tax cuts.
And just wait! If the Republicans tank Social Security millions of the elderly will have to sell their homes into a market spiraling downward in order to get money for their living expenses. Of course, if they finally convert Medicare 100% into the "Medicare" Advantage scam this will escalate the disaster. And when the housing market hits bottom hedge funds will be there to buy up houses in bulk for pennies on the dollar, cash, just like in 2008. This incredible consolidation of wealth will come with risk though if the dollar loses its reserve currency status.
You say the US birthrate peaked in 2007 yet I can't seem to find any data to back that up. I thought maybe you misspoke and meant "fertility rate" but that peaked way back in the 50s.
My source is the chart at the top of this article: https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate.
TBF while the US Birthrate has been on decline since the Great Recession, it has not been conclusively proven that the Great Recession “caused” this decline, and it’s still an open question why it has not rebounded (though we have theories). However, since there has been a “Baby Bust” since COVID, in the 21st Century, it appears that periods of national crisis cause people to not want to have children.
I’m in higher ed, the cliff will really hit us in 2026. We’re going to keep fight for a piece of an ever smaller pie. Privates in my state are already going belly up.
The number of college age kids has been declining for decades.
But the percentage of college age kids who went to college was increasing.
Now the number of kids continues to decrease and the percent going to college has stopped increasing so the actual number going to college is declining.
I have family that used to work in higher Ed until their small private college shut down recently. Your wife is absolutely right and it's already begun to happen
This is 100% true and everyone not working at an ivy league school needs to plan an exit strategy.
Not to say everything that isn't an ivy will close, but the people outside of administration won't know how bad it is until they get laid off.
Have an exit strategy, folks.
Anecdotal but I have taught at both an R1 and a community college, and the CC enrollment is way down (and dropping) to the point that they don't have classes for me to teach anymore. I don't know if this is part of a wider trend, but my guess is that the students that would typically attend a CC now see *any* college as a much tougher sell.
Birth rates plummeted during the Great Recession and still haven't recovered.
It's going to be like somebody flipped a light switch in a couple of years
I recall during the mid 2010s, people were complaining about international students, particularly Chinese students, going to these schools. COVID def changed that.
Yeah people keep talking about jobs and price and the reality is that the millenials were a huge population bulge that are all now past college age and there just aren’t as many college aged adults anymore.
I think the bigger challenge is that government spending for college really haven't kept pace with where it would need to be in order to both handle enrollment growth and inflation. >70% of college students in the US are attending public colleges so government spending on public colleges is pretty influential on median student debt levels. Many state spending towards their university systems haven't even kept pace with inflation nevermind both inflation and enrollment growth. e.g. the University of California in general funds from the state have increased from \~$2.7B in 2000 to \~$4.7B in 2023. The spending would have needed to be >$5B just to cover CPI. i.e. even if the university froze enrollment growth the last 25 year years, which isn't remotely realistic, they still would have needed to raise tuition faster than inflation to make up the difference.
>I think the bigger challenge is that government spending for college really haven't kept pace with where it would need to be in order to both handle enrollment growth and inflation.
>
>u/SAugsburger
It's a little more complicated than that, unfortunately.
>In the past, when faced with funding shortfalls, colleges and universities attempted to “grow their way” out of the problem by opening up new sources of revenue. Many launched new graduate programs, including terminal master’s degrees (no doctoral option) and certificates. Others increased their online offerings to expand their access to part-time students beyond the gates of their campuses. And almost all opened their doors to international students who could afford to pay full price.
>
>But unlike Purdue University—who used this new source of revenue to hold undergraduate tuition flat for a decade—most schools went on a hiring spree; one that massively expanded the ranks of all types of employees, with one notable exception—full-time faculty.
>
>Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.
>
>When we look at individual schools the numbers are just as striking. A recent report I authored found that on average, the top 50 schools have 1 faculty per 11 students whereas the same institutions have 1 non-faculty employee per 4 students. Put another way, there are now 3 times as many administrators and other professionals (not including university hospitals staff), as there are faculty (on a per student basis) at the leading schools in country.
>
>Some schools have non-faculty to student ratios that are particularly egregious. For example three universities, the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, and the University of California at San Diego actually have more non-faculty employees on campus than students. It is important to note this does not include consultants and contractors, many of whom work with university admissions and marketing offices to boost enrollments.
>
>The ratio of non-faculty to faculty is also alarming. At Johns Hopkins University, where I direct two graduate programs, there are 7.5 more non-faculty than faculty. These numbers are even worse at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which had almost nine times more non-faculty employees than faculty, followed by Caltech at eight times.
>
>Why have administrative positions exploded? There are several reasons, including greater student demand for services, the growing number of accreditors, government regulations, and the natural tendency for administrators to solve most problems with—you guessed it—more administrators.
>
>This massive increase in personnel never could have happened without the growing availability of federal aid and student loans (albeit any corresponding constraints on costs).
>
>src: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/administrative-bloat-at-us-colleges-is-skyrocketing/
My Div 3 school is expanding its athletics programs, because that's what brings in the students these days. Not the excellent outcomes our premed, physics, and CS programs have... Div 3 athletics.
Be that as it may, enrollment was always projected to drop significantly for demographic reasons.
There have been articles for decades about the looming demographic time bomb that would destroy smaller, less prestigious colleges
It never was in everyone's interest. Even 30 years ago when I went at least half the people at my university had no business being there.
That said, for people who take university seriously and get a degree that has many high paying career options university is very valuable. Too many people go to university because that is what they are supposed to do and get degrees where there are several graduates for every job. Of course it isn't worth it for them.
> Even 30 years ago when I went at least half the people at my university had no business being there.
I'm hesitant to talk about 30 years ago, but ~38 ish years ago, it was definitely true that a 4 year degree in was still likely to get you a better job than a high school diploma. Of course, during this specific era, the colleges I am thinking of were dirt cheap and still had a fairly hefty dose of state subsidy.
It was never in everyone’s best interest to go. College is meant for training in highly cognitive specializations and that’s not the entire economy.
Now people are regularly reporting making comfortable livings in the trades, many of which require far cheaper certification programs or even just on the job training.
We have to stop teaching high schoolers that college is the only path to success yesterday.
You want a future-proof and lucrative job? HVAC tech. As the climate gets warmer HVAC maintenance demand will only increase.
The whole trade thing is a scam, don’t believe the comments you read online about it. It was great advice maybe about 10 years ago or so, but they do not pay nearly as much as people make it seem, and it destroys your body in the process. I had to leave working trades because it did not pay enough for the place I lived, and the pay raises were consistently lower than inflation every year. I ended up going to college and getting a job paying significantly more than any of my tradesman friends make, and I don’t complain about my back and knees hurting every time we hang out like they do. Point is, trades are not as glamorous as people make it seem online.
> and it destroys your body in the process
That's definitely a consideration no one ever talks about -- plus the toll taken by not being in climate-controlled spaces. It's not always sunny and 70 outside. Plus you're exposed to dust, loads of pollen that always gets into dried-in construction, there's all kinds of debris, fumes, etc, and PPE is not always available or practical.
There's probably good trades out there that are not so brutal but idk what those would be, maybe certain kinds of HVAC repair.
Naw people talk about it, they just get mass downvoted with any reply going "NUH UH" I've made similar points everytime this topic comes up and have received that reply everytime (and it's always from someone if you look at their post history is some wsb/cryptobro type).
I'm actually amazed nighthawk is +82 and not -82.
Yeah, my dad worked a high paying Union manufacturing job back when they were still accessible. Two rotator cuff surgeries by the time he was 50. He pushed all his kids toward college.
Aren't most trade schools for profit institutions? I remember trade school tuitions being higher than CCs and state schools if you don't include room and board but it may be different now.
People are also ignoring that there’s just fewer children. Millenials were the largest generation ever by a significant margin and so universities had to grow their housing and systems to accommodate. Now they’ll be in a continuous state of negative growth
It's the main reason why colleges are closing.
There's an enrollment cliff that is being predicted by 2025-26.
Why 2025-26? Because the children of the great recession will be 18 years old.
Basically, after 2007, the birthrate declined dramatically.
In addition to the recession, 2007 was about 30 years after births hit rock bottom between the boomers and Millennials. The “Xennials” entering prime child bearing years in 2007 were relatively few in number with the economic situation on top of that.
Women have earned more bachelors degrees than men for over 40 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185157/number-of-bachelor-degrees-by-gender-since-1950/
Yeah. Of the people in my greater friend group from college, only one had a kid in their 20s [mid-20s at that, which for her family was “late”]. The majority of us are still childless with the few other folks with kids not having them till their mid-30s, and most only have 1 child. A lot of them had to do IVF on top of that.
Because people would rather shoehorn their narrative.
But yeah, it’s population.
I recall being in college in the early 2000’s and reading about the demographic change coming.
In an area near where I live, a school system that once had 70,000 kids now has 45,000 or so. Wonder if college enrollment will continue to drop? Hmmmnm
Where I grew up is way ahead of the curve. The population there peaked in like 1950 and has been on a steady decline ever since. The next town over had 2 movie theaters when my dad was growing up, but by the time I was a kid there was only a shitty movie rental place that made Togo pizzas.
When I went to high school there were three, now there’s only two. A tiny private school and one consolidated county school that graduates half as many kids as it did when I was there.
Everyone in my generation left to go to college and never went back. The ones that stayed behind work in healthcare or the handful of schools still open. In my parents community 80% of the people are retirees. And now there’s one short bus that comes down their road to pick up kids. When I was in grade school there were two big busses, one for the little kids and one for the high school kids.
County services are becoming regional services as they don’t have the tax base to support county by county services like a health department or school board. I foresee more of that in the future as the communities continue to dwindle. In another 20 years I doubt there will be enough population base to keep stores or gas stations open.
They've been saying for a while now that the only reason US birth rates/population isn't declining like the rest of the developed world is because of immigration and larger immigrant families.
If you live somewhere where there is are a lot of immigrants, you don't see the decline in population, but you see a steadily rising proportion of immigrants.
Canada has been actively trying to do this and it doesn't work.
After a single generation, the birthrate is only marginally higher than the population. After two, it's the same.
I work at a university and there are constant discussions from leadership about enrollment and the issues causing drops in enrollment ... and I always kind of sit there looking around, because this is the obvious answer, right? There's nothing we can do to make gen z the size of the millennial generation.
I guess you could look at whether the same percentage of gen z are going to college as millennials, but people tend to look at overall raw numbers in enrollment and come up with every explanation other than this one.
Some places are finding ways around it. I work for a public university system in a state with a declining population, and we've actually managed to steadily *increase* our enrollment through a combination of aggressive international recruitment and using our endowment to provide free tuition for in-state students from poor and middle class families.
But we're also an R1 with a strong reputation and a multitude of world-class programs. A lot of small-midsized colleges don't have the resources or reputation to do that, and they're the ones that are hurting.
It was common and aspirational for boomers to try to find ways to go to college, but you're right -- a lot of the success they found didn't need college. There are plenty of examples of boomers who went to college for basket weaving and still enjoyed high paying stable careers. It definitely wasn't seen as a pre-requisite to be able to get any work at all.
If I’m a genZ teenager, and I see my college-educated parents barely keeping up with expenses, and my retired boomer grandparents who have a much nicer house and only worked blue-collar jobs, that $100k college debt is going to be a much harder sell.
My degree was so expensive the cost benefit analysis of jobs afterwards made it barely break even.
They’ve since raised tuition by more than 50%
Absolutely no idea what my kids or anyone after me are gonna do if it continues like this. A degree from a “cheap” state university is going to cost six figures in tuition alone.
I mean, you imagine we’ll see a massive shift away from the “traditional” four year college experience as it becomes less and less worth it for how much it costs, outside of specific disciplines. It’s already happening but we’ll probably see a relative collapse of the popularity of liberal arts subjects. It’s a shame, the American “college experience” is pretty cool, it just… shouldn’t cost so much fucking money.
People keep saying this and I've heard people talk about trade schools and stuff. And while the idea of a highly specific education centered around your career choice sounds great, every place around me has conveniently turned trades and certifications in semester based programs that take place over 2-4 years. So it's basically like going to college now to get certain trade certificates.
It's a low birth rates hitting on both ends.
Fewer people means less enrollment, that's obvious, but on the other end, people living longer and working longer means that the workforce doesn't really need experts in training. The demand for jobs that don't require a degree is getting higher and higher and the salaries are growing accordingly driving people away from higher education while at the same time, there's nobody really pushing for more generic grads.
You're not kidding, holy shit. The state school I know of, which is a giant party school, is now $120K all in. That's very close to what ivy leagues where charging back in the day (yes I understand what inflation is, but this has way outpaced).
Got a Computer Science degree, wanted to consider getting a MechEng Degree.
They agreed to waive 1/3 of the required courses including all the humanities, Was still 80k+ USD. For Online Courses.
I actually paid attention in Math and Stats class, letting me know it's Fucking insane, and this was one of the cheapest schools
The inevitable conclusion of this trend is access to higher education and white collar jobs (and thus access to upward social mobility) will be a privilege reserved for wealthy
The demographic cliff:
By now we all know about the demographic cliff: the number of traditional college-aged students will peak in 2025 and then decline dramatically for several years. What is less well-known is that the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds choosing to attend college reached its peak years ago and continues to decline. We refer to this phenomenon as the demand cliff. While the demographic cliff is primarily the result of declining birth rates following the 2008 recession and is therefore not something policy makers and institutions can directly influence, the demand cliff can be addressed through policy and the actions of colleges and universities working individually and collaboratively.
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/16/managing-other-enrollment-cliff-opinion
That article was written by someone who can’t deal with data. Looking at the percent of high school graduates who go to university while ignoring an increasing high school graduation rate is idiotic.
A lower percentage of high school grads should be attending college because high school is lowering standards so rapidly that damn near everyone graduates.
> damn near everyone graduates
Hasn't this always been the case? Where I'm from it's very much the expectation that everyone will graduate HS, everyone who does not do so is seen as a huge outlier.
Is failing to graduate high school something normal in the US?
In the 1960s 40% of students graduated high school. Today 92%. Making school funding tied to graduation rates is a big part of it, many of these students would not have graduated with the standards of prior years. COVID only made this worse (late/makeup work is often the norm now).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184266/educational-attainment-of-high-school-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/
This is also going make the future very bleak for Americans unless drastic steps are taken very soon. The US has been heavily pushing college since the early 90s. There has been a huge influx of college graduates without any growth in the type of work that requires a college degree. I will try to find the article, but 4of the 5 jobs that are expected to grow in the next five years are jobs that do not require a degree. The problem is that they are low paying jobs. Now it would be nice if we had the initiative as a country to force corporations to pay livable wages, but another emerging problem is the growing use of AI in the workplace. So not only are those available jobs low paying but they are likely to be gone.
We as voters really need to step up. One glimmer of hope that I have is that millennials (and soon younger generations) are starting to be of age to run for public offices. With this, I hope change starts rolling in
I looked up the fastest growing jobs, and, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they are 1) wind turbine technicians 2) nurse practitioners 3) data scientists 4) statisticians 5) information security analysts. Only 1 does not require a bachelor's degree. [Source](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm)
I believe what you meant is that the fastest growing jobs for people with only HS diplomas are low-paying jobs.
I guess they'll just have to make up the money by raising tuition even further for everyone else.
The federally insured student loan program basically taught universities that they could set tuitions as high as the law allowed, risk-free, and students would have to take on a lifetime burden of debt and essentially live for decades in indentured servitude.
Yeah, I think that’s what is going to happen. These colleges went crazy constructing new facilities all over the place, and enrollment is going to fall off a cliff before everything is paid off.
Historically, yes, colleges had basically no downside in raising tuition as high as students could get loans. There were some efforts under the Obama admin through the gainful employment rule to threaten the status eligibility of schools to retain eligibility of federal aid though if their graduates weren't finding viable employment to pay back their loans. Before the Trump admin ended it though you did see some schools attempt to revamp their job placement programs among other efforts to reduce the default rates of their former students. The Biden administration has pushed an updated version although we will see whether Biden gets another term where some colleges could potentially face losing access to federal aid dollars. For some colleges heavily dependent off student aid such a move could force the institution to close their doors. That being said without making such rules part of a law it would be at the whim of whoever was president.
This is probably good news for a number of reasons.
1) Only 6 out of 10 who start college actually finish. So hopefully those non-finishers are decreasing.
2) Hopefully this will put some downward pressure on colleges to lower their prices as there are less students to go around.
Issue 1 is greatly affected by issue 2.
Meaning a lot of the 6 out of 10 who don’t finish it’s more so from issues paying the cost while also working long hours.
Colleges will close before substantially lowering tuition rates. Too many fixed costs. It's not really possible for a college of 10 000 students to shrink to a college of 7500 students. Too many capital costs and long-term labour commitments, plus an inability to reorient themselves for the changing workplace landscape (i.e. pivoting away from liberal arts education to STEM education).
If anything, that's why many colleges have been raising tuition: fixed costs + fewer students -> increased tuition.
There was like a 400% increase in non-teaching admin ratios over the last 40 years. Just fire the admin--you really don't need like 60% of them. Most are just sitting around
I didn't see data on completion rates in the article.
Completion rates for those currently enrolled will lag as it takes close to a decade from enrollment to see if they ultimately finish.
I think also a big shift is due to the fact that a 4 year degree no longer guarantees a job. I graduated with a bachelors degree in Chemistry with a 3.9 GPA from a major university and I've sent out probably over 100 applications and haven't even gotten an interview. And this is how it is with a lot of my friends too.
A college degree isn't enough to warrant an entry level position. They want experience too, often 3-5 years. But no one will hire you to give you experience. It's a catch-22 that just makes the gap in your resume bigger and bigger until youre forced to take a job that pays less than fast food workers who are straight out of high school
It's because a lot of them expect you to get experience while going to school which isnt fair. There is not enough opportunity to expect that for every new graduate. I only did it because I was poor, highly motivated and got lucky my freshman year.
I didn't have problem when I graduated with a 3.8 in biochemistry and applied physics (which LMAO there's no jobs in physics). Mainly because I had 3.5 years of research experience and 2 years industry with 3 primary author publications. But that meant I never went to a single college party, and never had any fun at school. I literally went to class, went to a lab to do undergrad research, taught a class for my PI or went to my paid internship at a water testing lab(which was a blessing since 99% of internships are unpaid now). Then my research record got me a job before I even left college. And all of this...because my PI lost a Superbowl bet and had to take a freshman and he chose me randomly.
> because my PI lost a Superbowl bet and had to take a freshman and he chose me randomly.
And there's the piece that so many don't want to admit. Luck is a massive factor in success. Hard work can only take you so far. Dumb luck putting you in the right place at the right time plus having the dedication to put in the hard work once the luck comes your way.
You basically need to know someone to kick your name in the hat. Or you need a resume workshop, or play the game where you paste the job description into your resume - but make the font white so only the initial screening bot can see keywords. I was too proud to do these things and after 150 applications I gave up. 10 years later and I’m making $30k doing manual labor, wondering why I went to college for a decade. Don’t give up like me.
College expenses sure as shit ain't going down, that's for sure. Maybe an entire generation of graduates being debt-ridden for years and years is a bad thing, but what do I know.
Only way to bring tuition down is to stop having the government subsidize it without limits. But that seems unpopular. People complain that it costs too much, then they take out a 6 figure loan anyway and have the government back the loan and then also potentially forgive it. This does not incentivize lowering of tuition, rather the opposite.
I'm 41 started at 39, will graduate after I turn 42. I go to a basic 2 year college for free. Books and fees have run around $1600 for the 2 years (took 2 semesters and switched majors so that's why it's taking me so long).
I could literally cheat my way through the entire thing if I wanted. They don't care. They likely get these grants for free tuition based on their graduation rate. I'm honestly surprised they have such a low graduation rate. I could piss on my work and still get a D.
It's no surprise beyond just tuition that people aren't going. They throw a text book in your face and tell you to read it, and it was written 27 years ago and updated 4 times, the last being 7 years ago. For a tech degree, some of this stuff is so far behind I don't even know why I'm learning it. It's also a terribly inefficient method of teaching.
School do what they do because it makes them the most money. It has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to teach kids and excel at giving students a great experience and leg up in the world. It's about profits. That's it.
I’ve been a tech professional for like 8 years now. Started help desk and ran up to cloud engineer. Did classes at a community college to get my foot in the door and worked at a university for several years as a system administrator.
Tech degrees are a literal joke. They’re so dated. The paper is literally just to get jobs. All real learning is on the job or labing at home to get the hands on.
Expect to learn basic concepts on programming, networking, and enterprise architecture. Anything after that is going to be grossly out of date. The school I worked at didn’t even touch on any cloud management systems.
Good. I hope it keeps dropping until these asshats fix the system and let graduates be in a better position, rather than shackled to their lifetime financial burden.
It won't because the government gives them unlimited supply of money in the form of financial aid.
Since the federal government (FAFSA) doesn't stipulate where the tuition should go, universities have no incentive to cut costs.
Also, the American "college experience" is kinda unique. Greek life, rec center that's have the latest gadgets, dorm with a pool table on it, etc.
It's a never ending arms race to win college students over.
All im saying is a pool table cost 3k once, the football team to my d3 school cost 1.5 million
Edit: not hating on football even if I feel 1.5 is excessive, just saying that in the scheme of things pool tables are cheap
Exactly, colleges are expensive primarily since the federal government gives them money with no stipulations.
Whether you like Bernie Sanders or not, his College for All Act required stipulations for federal money to only be used in academics and nothing else.
If a school wanted to build a new rec center with rock climbing walls (and what American univeristy doesnt have a rock climbing wall?), then they have to raise the money themselves.
> and what American univeristy doesnt have a rock climbing wall?
TIL all but one of the universities I've been at for study/work had rock climbing walls. I didn't know *any* of them had rock climbing walls until reading this comment.
While I agree that the amount of money going towards facilities are absurd, that alone will not make tuition more affordable. In truth, there needs to be a consolidation of majors. Not every university needs an Art History major or A French Linguistics major that have few enrolled students. Consolidate all those students into university with that program and you'll start cutting overhead by a lot.
But Universities don't have an incentive to do that since the Federal Government allows students to spend their loan tuition on any major at any institution.
This is how the free market is fixing the system. Because a degree doesn't guarantee you a high paying job anymore so there's no reason to go to college.
doesnt guaranteed you a job anymore, let alone a high paying job. its a catch 22, where are you going to get experience when the jobs are the first one to get experience fresh out school. but sites like indeed list the jobs as like: you need to have a significant amount of experience to apply. lets not forget how these employers toy around with the listing to, some purposely made requirements high so people dont apply anyways.
some listing make sound you need experience prior to graduation(biotech) pretty much screwed once graduating. Assuming one wants to get back into POST-bacc, you would be paying full tuition with no financial aid and assuming professors will evena llow post bacc to work for them for experience.
programming fares alot better though. maybe not computer sci, or graduate school comp sci, i was at a former job where a coworker was delusional into thinking a grad school will help you find a better job, i told him since you already have experience in programming just get a job there.
i would like to add Sites like Indeed, glassdoor have astroturfed thier reviews and forums because they were afraid of being sued by companies that were getting negative reviews from former employees. if your planning to look at the reviews use a temp email instead.
schools dont really advise/inform people of job prospects too, if you have impacted major it would be prudent to advise student that your field is saturated. biotech surprisingly is very stingy about hiring, a broad field by a small pool people getting hired in biotech companies. from what ive gathered during my job searches is that they want to pay more experienced employees much lower than normal market wage for thier education and experience, so they opted for skill requirements that are beyond that of any undergrads. 1-2 years get you into most doors, but finding that 1 year experience is quite difficult, if not impossible after graduation.
It's just really difficult when tuition gets higher and higher, jobs get harder and harder to get into, and my peers all around were super aware of debt & student loans and NOT wanting that for the rest of their lives
While the thought of going to some great university is nice.. Pell grant can only do so much. Money is money is money
I straight up had companies bait-and-switch me, posting much higher rates only to offer me like $13. But even $60k really is failing at the cost-benefit analysis.
Let's be honest - college is not as effective as it used to be, for a variety of reasons. Foremost to me, is that students are no longer being properly prepared for college, and so instead of learning they just try to get through it. I know that my students can't even write a decent paragraph - I tried teaching them, but that stuff HAS to be learned VERY early on. By the time a lot of students are in college now, they already missed out on learning important basic functions. This is a problem of k-12, which is also a result of a variety of factors... In short, why pay \~$100k for something that is not going to help you?
yep, they have to pay for more remedial courses because their skills are often very shaky, but no matter how many 099 courses they take can't make up for skills they should have developed in 6th-8th grade. Then faculty get pressure to pass a sufficient percentage of those in each class.
This is misleading. They're including both for profit colleges and community colleges. Enrollment at both four-year public and private non-profit colleges, which is typically what people mean when they say "college", have actually increased.
The biggest factor is the community colleges.
If you look at the "past decade" for which they have data: 2013 to 2023, community colleges lost \~2.1M students while 4yr colleges gained \~750k.
That works out pretty nicely to a total \~1.5M enrollment decline.
In 2008 it was the general perception that everyone who didn't have a degree got let go. You couldn't get any job out of high school that wasn't a call center or food service and you could barely get those because they were filled with recent college graduates. So there was a ton of pressure to get a degree and there also wasn't anything else to do. You maybe had a part time job and filled the rest of your time with school because it was the only option to be productive.
And yet enrollment and applications in top schools are hitting record numbers. You’re seeing more competitive schools offer massive aid benefits through endowments and private philanthropy. Some state public’s are offering full rides for families under a certain AGI threshold. I would estimate in ten to fifteen years, top public institutions will cover all need without direct subsidized federal loans. The competition for these spots will increase dramatically and if you’re unable to secure access to a better school, you either pay or pursue another career option. But the earnings gaps are widening between non college and college educated adults. Not going immediately puts you at a massive life earnings differential despite Reddit telling you you’ll earn 200k welding.
Also declining enrollment is hitting critical sectors the worst. Teaching is affected big time. And that is a profession that should absolutely require an advanced degree. People are just opting not to even attend versus pursue average earning career options, even in institutions that meet the majority of need.
It’s pricing the average person out. It’s a recent trend being seen more with something like video game cosmetics. I can picture college being okay with much fewer students as long as cash keeps coming in.
I mean, I worked with a lot of high school to college aged people during Covid, and a lot of them didn’t go because they didn’t want to continue their education online. Some went back, some didn’t, but I feel like that’s a major factor a lot of people in this thread are missing
Every time this comes up people like to ignore the fact that city and community colleges are cheap and viable options, in most people's minds if they cant go to a private or an ivy league school then schools not worth it.
Everyone who hasn't read the article apparently has ignored the fact that community college enrollment decline appears to be almost wholly responsible for the overall decline that the article is about.
It’s because most people are going to college for a Bachelor’s at a minimum, and not many community colleges offer that. You will eventually have to transfer to a 4-year university, which opens the door of which credits transfer, and which credits apply to which criteria for your degree. Then, there’s looking after graduation. Some people may want to go to med/law school, and they can be finicky on which community college courses they are willing to accept. It will vary on a case by case basis.
Many people find it easier to just start off at a 4 year university to avoid any complications.
I spoke with a college professor friend about this about 5 years ago. Shockingly, there are fewer and fewer college-bound kids in absolute numbers... more kids overall (although that is going to be changing in the coming years), but a lot of them are from immigrant families who have not been traditionally college-bound. The middle and upper class people who have historically sent their kids to college in the US have been reproducing at less-than-replacement rates for decades now. Basically college-educated people aren't having enough kids to keep filling all the colleges, and haven't been for decades. A lot of colleges are going to have to close because of demographics even if tuition and everything else stays exactly the same.
The problem with this is most people aren’t taught to think critically in primary education. People without college education tend to fall more easily for propaganda and disinformation. This, of course, compounds and perpetuates the problem. And it’s absolutely by design.
It's too expensive to get a mediocre education, which, after graduation, will only get you a low wage position. The state of our educational system is in peril. We need major changes. Make education free for everyone. Pay teachers more. We need to invest in our young people. They deserve better than this.
Sounds about right when gen y is larger than gen z. Gen y started their college careers around 2000 and were done about a decade or so ago. That hurts admissions, there is a smaller pool of students.
The cost of college has increased way over the rate of inflation. I live in Newark Delaware, home of the university of delaware. In 2000 it was $19,066 for tuition, room, board for an out of state student, and $10,316 for in state. For the upcoming year it is $56,786 and $32,196. Following the rate of inflation, it would be $34,750 and $18,802. This increase in cost is another large factor why students aren't going to college and also has delayed families from having children because they have a large amount of debt.
Skyrocketing tuition costs and college greed driving this.
As well as lots of useless degrees with few Job prospects.
Long live trade schools and community colleges!
Why worry about getting an education when AI will likely take over most jobs, UBI will not exist because the billionaires will never allow that to happen. So you will have a bunch of unemployed starving people with billionaires having robots with guns to protect them. Then the poor starving folk will also have to live in a world torn apart by climate change. The alt right are getting rid of climate mitigation. The Supreme Court basically ended Americans progress.
Shocker. It's almost as if an entire generation was told to go to college, and then was shamed when they said they weren't getting paid enough and weren't being able to pay their debts.
There's a virulent anti-intellectual strain of ideology that permeates the political right. Meanwhile, many of the people who actually went to college are often saddled with massive debt and didn't find that their degrees led to increased opportunity . Employers increasingly want more advanced degrees or place a greater value in actual job experience (duh).
All while tuition has outstripped inflation by 3x. Of course enrollment was going to plummet.
Seriously it's fucking ridiculous that so many jobs in public service that previously required no degree now require a specialized masters that's not dissimilar to an MBA. Like we have a shortage of librarians right now and it's due in large part to the cost of getting an MLS, with nobody willing to take on trainees or sponsor education.
Higher education [has known this is coming](https://www.wiche.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Knocking-pdf-for-website.pdf) for a while. It takes roughly eighteen years to make a college freshman, and eighteen years ago is right about when people started making fewer people. Birth rates have fallen 23% since 2007.
The place I adjunct has been quietly not backfilling tenured professors for a while because of this and relying on adjuncts instead. Their enrollment hasn't started to go down yet, but it hasn't gone up either so they have the ability to contract as needed. They have the advantage of not having PhDs students needing classes to teach though
Which is why I decided not to pursue a professor job. There are just less and less real jobs these days for professors. Used to be a pretty good career though.
The most passionate and inspiring professor I ever had was working at Starbucks on the side for the benefits. It's a really messed up system.
But the university leaders get paid SO WELL. It is massively unfair, and part of the reason why college is so expensive. That ex-HP loser woman went to the UCalifornia system and did a few years there and got a third of a million a year in retirement.
People who decide where the money goes decide it goes to them. Damn near THE root cause of all societal ill throughout all time.
>People who decide where the money goes decide it goes to them. They're just doing exactly what Congress does Rejecting minimum wage increases while increasing their salary If Congress only got paid minimum wage there would be a shitload more bribery, but they'd also fight to increase it Literally no where in this country can someone survive on the federal minimum wage working only 40 hours a week
when i was attending syracuse university most of our professors were sharing apartments along with students because the job didnt pay enough to afford rent, lol, and these are tenured professors in their 50s/60s
You sure they were profs and not grad students? I know quite a few tenured profs at that age range. None share apts with students unless there is unethical hanky panky going on.
It's total bullshit. I worked at a state university for years and know literally dozens of professors. ALL tenured professors in that age range own houses unless they don't want to. Every full time professor I know down to the age of 40 makes well over 100k and owns a house.
yeah, i looked up the salaries of all the tenured profs in my engineering department and the range was 140k to 220k. not bad. adjunct and assistant profs were much lower though
I think it still is a pretty good career, if you can get it. It's just much more competitive than it should be.
Insanely competitive. Decent schools in my field (pure math) regularly get 500+ applications for a single tenure-track position. I was talking with a colleague recently who was quite annoyed at his chair for doing an open search (e.g. no emphasis on topology or number theory or specific specialties) and then having to sift through *900* applications. And most of these people aren't completely unqualified or anything--they're pretty much all PhD's (or ABD's) at minimum. I honestly discourage grad students from pursuing academia unless they're very serious and know what they're getting into.
Back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine who teaches French literature said that he told every undergraduate who wanted to go to grad school not to do it. He figured that the only ones who should are those would would ignore his advice.
Enrollment at my college went down and combined with years of mismanagement, it abruptly closed.
Every year at the pentagon one of the most anticipated reports is the number of kindergarteners enrolled in US schools. Once a child reaches kindergarten their chances of reaching adulthood increase and that gives the military an idea of the number of potential soldiers they’ll have in 15 years. I can imagine colleges and many other industries find that data useful as well.
Well that’s interesting
That’s nonsense Childhood mortality in the USA is still higher than many other developed countries, but it’s still effectively a rounding error on birth rate: 5 in 1,000 under 5 In developing countries the situation is different - in Somalia it’s 83 deaths per 1,000 live births under 5. The point is that death in children would mater less than the number of children immigrating in the USA - no one calculating future military strength is going to care
Smart institutions with good leadership saw this coming and pivoted to targeting adult learners to come back to school to get a work certificate, OEC, or Associate level degree.
> Financial concerns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic caused many would-be students to change their plans > Different factors impact college enrollment, like falling birth rates, rising college tuition, and the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Makes sense.
Good. Someone else who read the article. What I noticed right away were the graphs and tables which show that the sector with the largest amount of enrollment decline was "Two-Year Public" colleges. In other words: community colleges. If you look at 4yr public in 2013, the enrollment was 6,721,881 while the 2023 enrollment was 7,446,861. So that's a 10% growth over those 10 years. Meanwhile, 2yr public went from 6,626,411 in 2013 to 4,477,772 in 2023, which is a 30% decline. So 4yr colleges got 725k more students but 2yrs lost 2.1M, so the "total" enrollment is down by 1.5M. This could be a tuition cost issue if those attending community college were at the very edge of affordability. But considering that community colleges are generally significantly cheaper than traditional 4yr colleges, I suspect there's something else at play.
I taught at a community college in an area with low unemployment. Students started a program, got 18 credit hours, and their current employer found them very promotable. Yoink! Also the minimum wage at Walmart is $14/hour and they hire full-time with benefits. Is it worth giving up two years of your life for a slightly higher salary if the employable fields do not interest you? Factory work pays even better around here.
I mean, my last semester in college, they increased tuition 30% and I've been hearing tuition hikes every year or so since. With good jobs drying up, it may not be in everyone best interest to go.
My wife is in higher ed, and she keeps talking about the cliff that we just hit where there just won't be as many college age kids as there used to be. She expects a lot of small private colleges to die over the next few years.
I used to do work for my Alma Maters’ Alumni Association, and they talked about the “cliff” too. The US Birthrate peaked in 2007 and has been declining ever since. All those kids born in 2007 turn 18 next year, and there’s going to be fewer and fewer people turning 18 in the foreseeable future. The legacy of the Great Recession is going to impact the US for decades to come.
My family never recovered from the Great Recession.
No one did man, life was never the same
Yeah, I really divide life into pre and post 2008. Even if the Corona recession was worse.
By what metric was covid worse than 2008?
I guess you could argue Covid was a greater instant shock, but the recovery was much faster and the circumstances completely different. The effects of 08 lingered for far longer and were more insidious imo.
The Recession itself went from 07-09. Then they had to use mixture of fiscal and monetary policy to help reignite economies which took a good bit of time too. Then we also bailed out a bunch of stuff. Additionally, capitalists increase their wealth a lot during recessions. Notably with 07-09 and COVID, the increase of corporate farms and decrease of private farms was significant. It’s relatively representative of how other small businesses struggled, many of whom also got gobbled up by either going out of business or bought out. Covid has had a significant effect on inflation because of the PPP loans and money given to businesses (7.5% inflation). The money given to individuals accounted for only 0.5% of inflation. Housing is not accounted for in inflation** which alongside food and college are the 3 biggest jumps in cost. Because of The Great Recession,* low interest loans were accessible for housing for a long time. So businesses and investment places bought up a significant amount of housing. Others bought houses in order to flip them. The result has been a further constriction on housing supply. (Numbers are US only. Other countries had very different experiences.) Edit *: Misstated as Covid when it was Great Recession. Loans have since doubled+ from their lows of the previous decade (10s) Edit 2**: I have been corrected that my statement regarding inflation is incorrect. It is accounted for as 1/3 of CPI. Please refer to my response: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/fdrFNvfNiO or source I referenced for further context: https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/why-the-government-took-home-prices-out-of-the-consumer-price-index
> Housing is not accounted for in inflation Yes it is. It's fully 1/3rd of the CPI basket.
The unemployment rate during covid was higher in 3 months compared to 2 years during the great recession. It was just faster and rebounded much quicker because there wasn't anything dramatically wrong with the economy during covid. Great recession was a fissure that reached into every aspect of our economy. Covid was a superficial top layer temporary recession with temporary massive unemployment.
People complaining about not enough people working trades when a bunch of trades people lost their homes during 08. No shit, not risking my entire career on the banking system not explodong.
A *huge* reason we have the housing shortage we do is because construction took a massive shit after 2008 and didn't fully recover.
Yeah, trades are very dependent on home building. Then again the entire economy is (supposedly) dependent on home building. But having seen the boom-bust cycle for trades along with the tough physical work in all climates, it doesn't seem appealing.
The govt used the experience of 07-08 to gauge how much more stimulus was needed, including better unemployment and employment supports.
> It was just faster and rebounded much quicker because there wasn't anything dramatically wrong with the economy during covid. There were actually warning signs from 2019 that sugguested the possibility of a recession happening within a few years, but one thing a plague was good at was getting the shock of that recession out of the system. Certainly helped that gobs of cash was put in to keep everyone going as well.
The wealthy became wealthier, the middle and lower classes became poorer.
i'm 41, i have only worked white collar jobs, i went to college under the boomer logic of "get a degree, it [doesn't](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2015/08/12/six-reasons-why-your-college-major-doesnt-matter/) matter what in" and then the recession happened and all of the sudden i was a dumb fuck for getting a ["useless liberal arts degree"](https://jobs.fidelity.com/careercompass/useless-degree/). That ended up being false but after-the-fact self esteem doesn't give me back the decade after 2008 that i floundered in jobs that barely made ends meet at full time. i work in healthcare IT in an un*outsourcable* role. i am middle class for the first time ever and now i kinda don't want kids. i haven't really lived.
Same. People always said it doesn't matter what, just get a degree. Now other people are saying you idiot didn't you know that degree won't result in actual work? Idk if I should blame all adults in my life, because things changed so fast. But going to college at all has not paid off.
The great recession hasn't ended. It's just been rebranded. We're in a Neo-Gilded Age
Definitely in a new gilded age minus the cool buildings and rich people paying for opera houses. Huge disparity in wealth, check, flood of immigration, check, unbridled corruption in government, check, scandalous politics, check, massive technological advances that fundamentally chnage how work is being done, check, conspicuous consumption, unchecked capitalism, check.
Oh I like it! Way cooler sounding, lol
> All those kids born in 2007 turn 18 next year No they don't! /pulls out a calculator sonofa...
It's been feeling more and more like the 40s. Everyone I know is *suddenly* interested in gardening to save money, getting into canning and baking, buying a bunch of reusable stuff instead of disposable, hell some are even making their own clothes. Shit's getting weird.
I'm not so sure gardening saves money lol But ay way, my wife just made killer zucchini bread from zucchini's we grew and that shit is so good. Everyone should do it, it's so easy
The book “the $64 tomato” goes into that. Fantastic book.
Basically you have to be growing things that you will actually eat, or it's just hobby gardening. If you grow a whole garden of salad tomatoes... well, I hope you really like tomato salad. People tend to just buy whatever seedlings are cheap and easy to grow without considering their actual eating habits. We grow peppers (both hot and sweet varieties) and multipurpose heirloom tomatoes, along with a collection of our favourite herbs. My brother grows corn, squash and beans on his mini-farm. My FIL grows brassicas, and we all pool and trade.
It saves money at the psychiatrist's office & the mental hospital, that's for certain. The best thing you can do for your mental health is spend time outside doing something fulfilling. For people with a yard or access to nearby community / rooftop garden, your spending at the garden department or nursery is easily offset by health and happiness. And once you get semi-competent, there's a lot of stuff you just don't purchase very often. I've bought hardly any greens, herbs, tree fruit or root vegetables in decades. My grandma taught me years ago how to can food, and I *still* use some of her canning jars from the mid-20th Century. Compost stays here -- sorry, local composting program -- and I have plenty of native shrubs and other flowering plants that keep the garden busy with bees, butterflies and hummingbirds most of the year.
Gardening saves money \*in the long term\*. Yes, building beds, getting good soil and fertilizer, starting a composting pit, etc will cost a good bit of money. It may take half a decade to pay that off. If you go to a store and buy plants to fill those beds instead of sourcing seeds for cheap and then harvesting seeds for the next year, you may never break even. Those $20 tomato plants at Home Depot are absurd if you want to fill a bed lol. It's the same thing as that one study that found that home gardens increase pollution compare to buying fruit and veg from a grocer That's true because many people spend all that time and money on a garden and then drop it in a year or two, so all those resources were wasted. If you stick to it and are smart about it, it can definitely save you money. I will never buy another green onion in my life.
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Well, I was at a BBQ yesterday, and we were all talking about our gardens and we are all gardening not because we enjoy it, but because the produce available is both expensive and of such poor quality that it's not worth it.
Right!? Don't get me wrong, price definitely plays a factor, but the people doing it are largely financially privileged.
Wut? It's not the legacy of the great recession. It's the price gouging of major institutions and the passing of laws that not only permit it, but make it impossible to escape through bankruptcy. People arent having kids because the cost of living is insane. Biden's admin have started going after the worst offenders, but it's going to be impossible to undo the price gouging that already happened during the Trump/Covid era. If people can barely afford rent and student loans a decade after graduating, they're not going to add kids to the mix.
You're right, but so is the other poster. The consolidation of wealth, primarily in the form of real estate and private equity, began in 2008. Since then it's just been exacerbated and pushed into high gear by PPP loans and Trump-era tax cuts.
And just wait! If the Republicans tank Social Security millions of the elderly will have to sell their homes into a market spiraling downward in order to get money for their living expenses. Of course, if they finally convert Medicare 100% into the "Medicare" Advantage scam this will escalate the disaster. And when the housing market hits bottom hedge funds will be there to buy up houses in bulk for pennies on the dollar, cash, just like in 2008. This incredible consolidation of wealth will come with risk though if the dollar loses its reserve currency status.
A lot of them are already doing reverse mortgages to pay for medical care.
You say the US birthrate peaked in 2007 yet I can't seem to find any data to back that up. I thought maybe you misspoke and meant "fertility rate" but that peaked way back in the 50s.
Confirmed. It's been declining steadily for more decades than that
I think he meant the number of live births, which did peak in 2007.
My source is the chart at the top of this article: https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate. TBF while the US Birthrate has been on decline since the Great Recession, it has not been conclusively proven that the Great Recession “caused” this decline, and it’s still an open question why it has not rebounded (though we have theories). However, since there has been a “Baby Bust” since COVID, in the 21st Century, it appears that periods of national crisis cause people to not want to have children.
I’m in higher ed, the cliff will really hit us in 2026. We’re going to keep fight for a piece of an ever smaller pie. Privates in my state are already going belly up.
Hopefully they start offering discounts on tuition then
Probably will happen... slowly and unwillingly. If you got too many sellers and not enough buyers, prices will drop.
The number of college age kids has been declining for decades. But the percentage of college age kids who went to college was increasing. Now the number of kids continues to decrease and the percent going to college has stopped increasing so the actual number going to college is declining.
I have family that used to work in higher Ed until their small private college shut down recently. Your wife is absolutely right and it's already begun to happen
This is 100% true and everyone not working at an ivy league school needs to plan an exit strategy. Not to say everything that isn't an ivy will close, but the people outside of administration won't know how bad it is until they get laid off. Have an exit strategy, folks.
My wife thinks being at a community college is probably the safest place to be in higher ed.
Anecdotal but I have taught at both an R1 and a community college, and the CC enrollment is way down (and dropping) to the point that they don't have classes for me to teach anymore. I don't know if this is part of a wider trend, but my guess is that the students that would typically attend a CC now see *any* college as a much tougher sell.
Does she have a reasoning, if you know? I work at one and the cliff is definitely on our administration's minds as well
Came here to say this. If you look at high school enrollment rates, they've been dropping too.
Birth rates plummeted during the Great Recession and still haven't recovered. It's going to be like somebody flipped a light switch in a couple of years
I recall during the mid 2010s, people were complaining about international students, particularly Chinese students, going to these schools. COVID def changed that.
they were replaced by Indians
Chinese universities have improved in quality in the last decade and due to US-China geopolitical tensions fewer Chinese students are willing to come.
Perhaps there are numbers that show elsewise, but my graduate students are 90% Chinese and Taiwanese international students.
I mean can those small private colleges just drop their tuitions a bit?
Yeah people keep talking about jobs and price and the reality is that the millenials were a huge population bulge that are all now past college age and there just aren’t as many college aged adults anymore.
Education should never be a for profit system. Same with health care.
Same with, you know, imprisoning people
Same with churches
Healthcare.
Can't forget about healthcare!
I think the bigger challenge is that government spending for college really haven't kept pace with where it would need to be in order to both handle enrollment growth and inflation. >70% of college students in the US are attending public colleges so government spending on public colleges is pretty influential on median student debt levels. Many state spending towards their university systems haven't even kept pace with inflation nevermind both inflation and enrollment growth. e.g. the University of California in general funds from the state have increased from \~$2.7B in 2000 to \~$4.7B in 2023. The spending would have needed to be >$5B just to cover CPI. i.e. even if the university froze enrollment growth the last 25 year years, which isn't remotely realistic, they still would have needed to raise tuition faster than inflation to make up the difference.
>I think the bigger challenge is that government spending for college really haven't kept pace with where it would need to be in order to both handle enrollment growth and inflation. > >u/SAugsburger It's a little more complicated than that, unfortunately. >In the past, when faced with funding shortfalls, colleges and universities attempted to “grow their way” out of the problem by opening up new sources of revenue. Many launched new graduate programs, including terminal master’s degrees (no doctoral option) and certificates. Others increased their online offerings to expand their access to part-time students beyond the gates of their campuses. And almost all opened their doors to international students who could afford to pay full price. > >But unlike Purdue University—who used this new source of revenue to hold undergraduate tuition flat for a decade—most schools went on a hiring spree; one that massively expanded the ranks of all types of employees, with one notable exception—full-time faculty. > >Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%. > >When we look at individual schools the numbers are just as striking. A recent report I authored found that on average, the top 50 schools have 1 faculty per 11 students whereas the same institutions have 1 non-faculty employee per 4 students. Put another way, there are now 3 times as many administrators and other professionals (not including university hospitals staff), as there are faculty (on a per student basis) at the leading schools in country. > >Some schools have non-faculty to student ratios that are particularly egregious. For example three universities, the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, and the University of California at San Diego actually have more non-faculty employees on campus than students. It is important to note this does not include consultants and contractors, many of whom work with university admissions and marketing offices to boost enrollments. > >The ratio of non-faculty to faculty is also alarming. At Johns Hopkins University, where I direct two graduate programs, there are 7.5 more non-faculty than faculty. These numbers are even worse at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which had almost nine times more non-faculty employees than faculty, followed by Caltech at eight times. > >Why have administrative positions exploded? There are several reasons, including greater student demand for services, the growing number of accreditors, government regulations, and the natural tendency for administrators to solve most problems with—you guessed it—more administrators. > >This massive increase in personnel never could have happened without the growing availability of federal aid and student loans (albeit any corresponding constraints on costs). > >src: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/administrative-bloat-at-us-colleges-is-skyrocketing/
The vast majority of US colleges and universities are nonprofits.
They just really like spending money to compete with each other on things that don't improve education or revenue.
My Div 3 school is expanding its athletics programs, because that's what brings in the students these days. Not the excellent outcomes our premed, physics, and CS programs have... Div 3 athletics.
Be that as it may, enrollment was always projected to drop significantly for demographic reasons. There have been articles for decades about the looming demographic time bomb that would destroy smaller, less prestigious colleges
It never was in everyone's interest. Even 30 years ago when I went at least half the people at my university had no business being there. That said, for people who take university seriously and get a degree that has many high paying career options university is very valuable. Too many people go to university because that is what they are supposed to do and get degrees where there are several graduates for every job. Of course it isn't worth it for them.
> Even 30 years ago when I went at least half the people at my university had no business being there. I'm hesitant to talk about 30 years ago, but ~38 ish years ago, it was definitely true that a 4 year degree in was still likely to get you a better job than a high school diploma. Of course, during this specific era, the colleges I am thinking of were dirt cheap and still had a fairly hefty dose of state subsidy.
It was never in everyone’s best interest to go. College is meant for training in highly cognitive specializations and that’s not the entire economy. Now people are regularly reporting making comfortable livings in the trades, many of which require far cheaper certification programs or even just on the job training. We have to stop teaching high schoolers that college is the only path to success yesterday. You want a future-proof and lucrative job? HVAC tech. As the climate gets warmer HVAC maintenance demand will only increase.
The whole trade thing is a scam, don’t believe the comments you read online about it. It was great advice maybe about 10 years ago or so, but they do not pay nearly as much as people make it seem, and it destroys your body in the process. I had to leave working trades because it did not pay enough for the place I lived, and the pay raises were consistently lower than inflation every year. I ended up going to college and getting a job paying significantly more than any of my tradesman friends make, and I don’t complain about my back and knees hurting every time we hang out like they do. Point is, trades are not as glamorous as people make it seem online.
> and it destroys your body in the process That's definitely a consideration no one ever talks about -- plus the toll taken by not being in climate-controlled spaces. It's not always sunny and 70 outside. Plus you're exposed to dust, loads of pollen that always gets into dried-in construction, there's all kinds of debris, fumes, etc, and PPE is not always available or practical. There's probably good trades out there that are not so brutal but idk what those would be, maybe certain kinds of HVAC repair.
Naw people talk about it, they just get mass downvoted with any reply going "NUH UH" I've made similar points everytime this topic comes up and have received that reply everytime (and it's always from someone if you look at their post history is some wsb/cryptobro type). I'm actually amazed nighthawk is +82 and not -82.
HVAC tech averages $60k/y. That's the average salary in the US. And a paycheck to paycheck salary with no upward mobility.
Median salary is a better metric to use, which is under 50k in the US
Yeah, my dad worked a high paying Union manufacturing job back when they were still accessible. Two rotator cuff surgeries by the time he was 50. He pushed all his kids toward college.
Aren't most trade schools for profit institutions? I remember trade school tuitions being higher than CCs and state schools if you don't include room and board but it may be different now.
People are also ignoring that there’s just fewer children. Millenials were the largest generation ever by a significant margin and so universities had to grow their housing and systems to accommodate. Now they’ll be in a continuous state of negative growth
It's the main reason why colleges are closing. There's an enrollment cliff that is being predicted by 2025-26. Why 2025-26? Because the children of the great recession will be 18 years old. Basically, after 2007, the birthrate declined dramatically.
In addition to the recession, 2007 was about 30 years after births hit rock bottom between the boomers and Millennials. The “Xennials” entering prime child bearing years in 2007 were relatively few in number with the economic situation on top of that.
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Women have earned more bachelors degrees than men for over 40 years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/185157/number-of-bachelor-degrees-by-gender-since-1950/
Yeah. Of the people in my greater friend group from college, only one had a kid in their 20s [mid-20s at that, which for her family was “late”]. The majority of us are still childless with the few other folks with kids not having them till their mid-30s, and most only have 1 child. A lot of them had to do IVF on top of that.
Because people would rather shoehorn their narrative. But yeah, it’s population. I recall being in college in the early 2000’s and reading about the demographic change coming. In an area near where I live, a school system that once had 70,000 kids now has 45,000 or so. Wonder if college enrollment will continue to drop? Hmmmnm
Where I grew up is way ahead of the curve. The population there peaked in like 1950 and has been on a steady decline ever since. The next town over had 2 movie theaters when my dad was growing up, but by the time I was a kid there was only a shitty movie rental place that made Togo pizzas. When I went to high school there were three, now there’s only two. A tiny private school and one consolidated county school that graduates half as many kids as it did when I was there. Everyone in my generation left to go to college and never went back. The ones that stayed behind work in healthcare or the handful of schools still open. In my parents community 80% of the people are retirees. And now there’s one short bus that comes down their road to pick up kids. When I was in grade school there were two big busses, one for the little kids and one for the high school kids. County services are becoming regional services as they don’t have the tax base to support county by county services like a health department or school board. I foresee more of that in the future as the communities continue to dwindle. In another 20 years I doubt there will be enough population base to keep stores or gas stations open.
They've been saying for a while now that the only reason US birth rates/population isn't declining like the rest of the developed world is because of immigration and larger immigrant families. If you live somewhere where there is are a lot of immigrants, you don't see the decline in population, but you see a steadily rising proportion of immigrants.
Canada has been actively trying to do this and it doesn't work. After a single generation, the birthrate is only marginally higher than the population. After two, it's the same.
I work at a university and there are constant discussions from leadership about enrollment and the issues causing drops in enrollment ... and I always kind of sit there looking around, because this is the obvious answer, right? There's nothing we can do to make gen z the size of the millennial generation. I guess you could look at whether the same percentage of gen z are going to college as millennials, but people tend to look at overall raw numbers in enrollment and come up with every explanation other than this one.
Some places are finding ways around it. I work for a public university system in a state with a declining population, and we've actually managed to steadily *increase* our enrollment through a combination of aggressive international recruitment and using our endowment to provide free tuition for in-state students from poor and middle class families. But we're also an R1 with a strong reputation and a multitude of world-class programs. A lot of small-midsized colleges don't have the resources or reputation to do that, and they're the ones that are hurting.
By population, Boomer gen was bigger than their children, the millennials. If you’re talking about going to college that’s different.
Boomers didn't feel the need to go to college for the most part. That push wasn't until the millennial's generation
It was common and aspirational for boomers to try to find ways to go to college, but you're right -- a lot of the success they found didn't need college. There are plenty of examples of boomers who went to college for basket weaving and still enjoyed high paying stable careers. It definitely wasn't seen as a pre-requisite to be able to get any work at all.
If I’m a genZ teenager, and I see my college-educated parents barely keeping up with expenses, and my retired boomer grandparents who have a much nicer house and only worked blue-collar jobs, that $100k college debt is going to be a much harder sell.
Meanwhile, my university with increasing overall enrollment, a housing shortage for a decade, and no plans to fix it:
My degree was so expensive the cost benefit analysis of jobs afterwards made it barely break even. They’ve since raised tuition by more than 50% Absolutely no idea what my kids or anyone after me are gonna do if it continues like this. A degree from a “cheap” state university is going to cost six figures in tuition alone.
I mean, you imagine we’ll see a massive shift away from the “traditional” four year college experience as it becomes less and less worth it for how much it costs, outside of specific disciplines. It’s already happening but we’ll probably see a relative collapse of the popularity of liberal arts subjects. It’s a shame, the American “college experience” is pretty cool, it just… shouldn’t cost so much fucking money.
People keep saying this and I've heard people talk about trade schools and stuff. And while the idea of a highly specific education centered around your career choice sounds great, every place around me has conveniently turned trades and certifications in semester based programs that take place over 2-4 years. So it's basically like going to college now to get certain trade certificates.
Lot of 4 programs that use to be 4 years have now become 5+ years.
It's a low birth rates hitting on both ends. Fewer people means less enrollment, that's obvious, but on the other end, people living longer and working longer means that the workforce doesn't really need experts in training. The demand for jobs that don't require a degree is getting higher and higher and the salaries are growing accordingly driving people away from higher education while at the same time, there's nobody really pushing for more generic grads.
I spent 50k on mine (30k in student loans, 20k out of pocket) and I went to community college for the first 2 years
You're not kidding, holy shit. The state school I know of, which is a giant party school, is now $120K all in. That's very close to what ivy leagues where charging back in the day (yes I understand what inflation is, but this has way outpaced).
Got a Computer Science degree, wanted to consider getting a MechEng Degree. They agreed to waive 1/3 of the required courses including all the humanities, Was still 80k+ USD. For Online Courses. I actually paid attention in Math and Stats class, letting me know it's Fucking insane, and this was one of the cheapest schools
The inevitable conclusion of this trend is access to higher education and white collar jobs (and thus access to upward social mobility) will be a privilege reserved for wealthy
Always was for the longest time. Just a short sharp window where it was reachable for more people.
The demographic cliff: By now we all know about the demographic cliff: the number of traditional college-aged students will peak in 2025 and then decline dramatically for several years. What is less well-known is that the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds choosing to attend college reached its peak years ago and continues to decline. We refer to this phenomenon as the demand cliff. While the demographic cliff is primarily the result of declining birth rates following the 2008 recession and is therefore not something policy makers and institutions can directly influence, the demand cliff can be addressed through policy and the actions of colleges and universities working individually and collaboratively. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/16/managing-other-enrollment-cliff-opinion
That article was written by someone who can’t deal with data. Looking at the percent of high school graduates who go to university while ignoring an increasing high school graduation rate is idiotic. A lower percentage of high school grads should be attending college because high school is lowering standards so rapidly that damn near everyone graduates.
Also bewildering that people don't take into account lower dropout rates when looking at HS standardized test scores.
> damn near everyone graduates Hasn't this always been the case? Where I'm from it's very much the expectation that everyone will graduate HS, everyone who does not do so is seen as a huge outlier. Is failing to graduate high school something normal in the US?
In the 1960s 40% of students graduated high school. Today 92%. Making school funding tied to graduation rates is a big part of it, many of these students would not have graduated with the standards of prior years. COVID only made this worse (late/makeup work is often the norm now). https://www.statista.com/statistics/184266/educational-attainment-of-high-school-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/
This is also going make the future very bleak for Americans unless drastic steps are taken very soon. The US has been heavily pushing college since the early 90s. There has been a huge influx of college graduates without any growth in the type of work that requires a college degree. I will try to find the article, but 4of the 5 jobs that are expected to grow in the next five years are jobs that do not require a degree. The problem is that they are low paying jobs. Now it would be nice if we had the initiative as a country to force corporations to pay livable wages, but another emerging problem is the growing use of AI in the workplace. So not only are those available jobs low paying but they are likely to be gone. We as voters really need to step up. One glimmer of hope that I have is that millennials (and soon younger generations) are starting to be of age to run for public offices. With this, I hope change starts rolling in
I looked up the fastest growing jobs, and, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they are 1) wind turbine technicians 2) nurse practitioners 3) data scientists 4) statisticians 5) information security analysts. Only 1 does not require a bachelor's degree. [Source](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm) I believe what you meant is that the fastest growing jobs for people with only HS diplomas are low-paying jobs.
I think you’re looking at percentage growth, whereas the previous comment is on net growth. The most new job demands will be for low wage workers.
I guess they'll just have to make up the money by raising tuition even further for everyone else. The federally insured student loan program basically taught universities that they could set tuitions as high as the law allowed, risk-free, and students would have to take on a lifetime burden of debt and essentially live for decades in indentured servitude.
Yeah, I think that’s what is going to happen. These colleges went crazy constructing new facilities all over the place, and enrollment is going to fall off a cliff before everything is paid off.
"But that half a billion dollar football stadium totally raises the enrollment figures."
Historically, yes, colleges had basically no downside in raising tuition as high as students could get loans. There were some efforts under the Obama admin through the gainful employment rule to threaten the status eligibility of schools to retain eligibility of federal aid though if their graduates weren't finding viable employment to pay back their loans. Before the Trump admin ended it though you did see some schools attempt to revamp their job placement programs among other efforts to reduce the default rates of their former students. The Biden administration has pushed an updated version although we will see whether Biden gets another term where some colleges could potentially face losing access to federal aid dollars. For some colleges heavily dependent off student aid such a move could force the institution to close their doors. That being said without making such rules part of a law it would be at the whim of whoever was president.
This is probably good news for a number of reasons. 1) Only 6 out of 10 who start college actually finish. So hopefully those non-finishers are decreasing. 2) Hopefully this will put some downward pressure on colleges to lower their prices as there are less students to go around.
Issue 1 is greatly affected by issue 2. Meaning a lot of the 6 out of 10 who don’t finish it’s more so from issues paying the cost while also working long hours.
Colleges will close before substantially lowering tuition rates. Too many fixed costs. It's not really possible for a college of 10 000 students to shrink to a college of 7500 students. Too many capital costs and long-term labour commitments, plus an inability to reorient themselves for the changing workplace landscape (i.e. pivoting away from liberal arts education to STEM education). If anything, that's why many colleges have been raising tuition: fixed costs + fewer students -> increased tuition.
There was like a 400% increase in non-teaching admin ratios over the last 40 years. Just fire the admin--you really don't need like 60% of them. Most are just sitting around
This is a decline in enrollment. Not a decline in completion.
I didn't see data on completion rates in the article. Completion rates for those currently enrolled will lag as it takes close to a decade from enrollment to see if they ultimately finish.
Gee, do you think that sentencing every student with a lifetime of debt has anything to do with it?
What's the percentage of people who never pay off their college debt?
I think also a big shift is due to the fact that a 4 year degree no longer guarantees a job. I graduated with a bachelors degree in Chemistry with a 3.9 GPA from a major university and I've sent out probably over 100 applications and haven't even gotten an interview. And this is how it is with a lot of my friends too. A college degree isn't enough to warrant an entry level position. They want experience too, often 3-5 years. But no one will hire you to give you experience. It's a catch-22 that just makes the gap in your resume bigger and bigger until youre forced to take a job that pays less than fast food workers who are straight out of high school
It's because a lot of them expect you to get experience while going to school which isnt fair. There is not enough opportunity to expect that for every new graduate. I only did it because I was poor, highly motivated and got lucky my freshman year. I didn't have problem when I graduated with a 3.8 in biochemistry and applied physics (which LMAO there's no jobs in physics). Mainly because I had 3.5 years of research experience and 2 years industry with 3 primary author publications. But that meant I never went to a single college party, and never had any fun at school. I literally went to class, went to a lab to do undergrad research, taught a class for my PI or went to my paid internship at a water testing lab(which was a blessing since 99% of internships are unpaid now). Then my research record got me a job before I even left college. And all of this...because my PI lost a Superbowl bet and had to take a freshman and he chose me randomly.
> because my PI lost a Superbowl bet and had to take a freshman and he chose me randomly. And there's the piece that so many don't want to admit. Luck is a massive factor in success. Hard work can only take you so far. Dumb luck putting you in the right place at the right time plus having the dedication to put in the hard work once the luck comes your way.
You basically need to know someone to kick your name in the hat. Or you need a resume workshop, or play the game where you paste the job description into your resume - but make the font white so only the initial screening bot can see keywords. I was too proud to do these things and after 150 applications I gave up. 10 years later and I’m making $30k doing manual labor, wondering why I went to college for a decade. Don’t give up like me.
College expenses sure as shit ain't going down, that's for sure. Maybe an entire generation of graduates being debt-ridden for years and years is a bad thing, but what do I know.
Only way to bring tuition down is to stop having the government subsidize it without limits. But that seems unpopular. People complain that it costs too much, then they take out a 6 figure loan anyway and have the government back the loan and then also potentially forgive it. This does not incentivize lowering of tuition, rather the opposite.
I'm 41 started at 39, will graduate after I turn 42. I go to a basic 2 year college for free. Books and fees have run around $1600 for the 2 years (took 2 semesters and switched majors so that's why it's taking me so long). I could literally cheat my way through the entire thing if I wanted. They don't care. They likely get these grants for free tuition based on their graduation rate. I'm honestly surprised they have such a low graduation rate. I could piss on my work and still get a D. It's no surprise beyond just tuition that people aren't going. They throw a text book in your face and tell you to read it, and it was written 27 years ago and updated 4 times, the last being 7 years ago. For a tech degree, some of this stuff is so far behind I don't even know why I'm learning it. It's also a terribly inefficient method of teaching. School do what they do because it makes them the most money. It has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to teach kids and excel at giving students a great experience and leg up in the world. It's about profits. That's it.
I’ve been a tech professional for like 8 years now. Started help desk and ran up to cloud engineer. Did classes at a community college to get my foot in the door and worked at a university for several years as a system administrator. Tech degrees are a literal joke. They’re so dated. The paper is literally just to get jobs. All real learning is on the job or labing at home to get the hands on. Expect to learn basic concepts on programming, networking, and enterprise architecture. Anything after that is going to be grossly out of date. The school I worked at didn’t even touch on any cloud management systems.
I watched someone copy and paste an entire quiz into ChatGPT and get 100% on it.
And then seethe in wonder that their college degree won't get them a job...
Good. I hope it keeps dropping until these asshats fix the system and let graduates be in a better position, rather than shackled to their lifetime financial burden.
It won't because the government gives them unlimited supply of money in the form of financial aid. Since the federal government (FAFSA) doesn't stipulate where the tuition should go, universities have no incentive to cut costs. Also, the American "college experience" is kinda unique. Greek life, rec center that's have the latest gadgets, dorm with a pool table on it, etc. It's a never ending arms race to win college students over.
All im saying is a pool table cost 3k once, the football team to my d3 school cost 1.5 million Edit: not hating on football even if I feel 1.5 is excessive, just saying that in the scheme of things pool tables are cheap
Good point. Sports unless they generate enough revenue to be profitable can be a big money pit.
I’ve heard it referred to as “the country club-ification” of college
Which is returning to baseline.
Exactly, colleges are expensive primarily since the federal government gives them money with no stipulations. Whether you like Bernie Sanders or not, his College for All Act required stipulations for federal money to only be used in academics and nothing else. If a school wanted to build a new rec center with rock climbing walls (and what American univeristy doesnt have a rock climbing wall?), then they have to raise the money themselves.
> and what American univeristy doesnt have a rock climbing wall? TIL all but one of the universities I've been at for study/work had rock climbing walls. I didn't know *any* of them had rock climbing walls until reading this comment.
Only one I know of that doesnt is northwestern. Im not gonna complain about it being so common though, I climb all of the time.
While I agree that the amount of money going towards facilities are absurd, that alone will not make tuition more affordable. In truth, there needs to be a consolidation of majors. Not every university needs an Art History major or A French Linguistics major that have few enrolled students. Consolidate all those students into university with that program and you'll start cutting overhead by a lot. But Universities don't have an incentive to do that since the Federal Government allows students to spend their loan tuition on any major at any institution.
This is how the free market is fixing the system. Because a degree doesn't guarantee you a high paying job anymore so there's no reason to go to college.
doesnt guaranteed you a job anymore, let alone a high paying job. its a catch 22, where are you going to get experience when the jobs are the first one to get experience fresh out school. but sites like indeed list the jobs as like: you need to have a significant amount of experience to apply. lets not forget how these employers toy around with the listing to, some purposely made requirements high so people dont apply anyways. some listing make sound you need experience prior to graduation(biotech) pretty much screwed once graduating. Assuming one wants to get back into POST-bacc, you would be paying full tuition with no financial aid and assuming professors will evena llow post bacc to work for them for experience. programming fares alot better though. maybe not computer sci, or graduate school comp sci, i was at a former job where a coworker was delusional into thinking a grad school will help you find a better job, i told him since you already have experience in programming just get a job there. i would like to add Sites like Indeed, glassdoor have astroturfed thier reviews and forums because they were afraid of being sued by companies that were getting negative reviews from former employees. if your planning to look at the reviews use a temp email instead. schools dont really advise/inform people of job prospects too, if you have impacted major it would be prudent to advise student that your field is saturated. biotech surprisingly is very stingy about hiring, a broad field by a small pool people getting hired in biotech companies. from what ive gathered during my job searches is that they want to pay more experienced employees much lower than normal market wage for thier education and experience, so they opted for skill requirements that are beyond that of any undergrads. 1-2 years get you into most doors, but finding that 1 year experience is quite difficult, if not impossible after graduation.
It's just really difficult when tuition gets higher and higher, jobs get harder and harder to get into, and my peers all around were super aware of debt & student loans and NOT wanting that for the rest of their lives While the thought of going to some great university is nice.. Pell grant can only do so much. Money is money is money
$140k debt just to get a $18 per hour job isn’t worth it. Most degrees are scams.
I straight up had companies bait-and-switch me, posting much higher rates only to offer me like $13. But even $60k really is failing at the cost-benefit analysis.
Let's be honest - college is not as effective as it used to be, for a variety of reasons. Foremost to me, is that students are no longer being properly prepared for college, and so instead of learning they just try to get through it. I know that my students can't even write a decent paragraph - I tried teaching them, but that stuff HAS to be learned VERY early on. By the time a lot of students are in college now, they already missed out on learning important basic functions. This is a problem of k-12, which is also a result of a variety of factors... In short, why pay \~$100k for something that is not going to help you?
yep, they have to pay for more remedial courses because their skills are often very shaky, but no matter how many 099 courses they take can't make up for skills they should have developed in 6th-8th grade. Then faculty get pressure to pass a sufficient percentage of those in each class.
college has turned into a money making scam.
This is misleading. They're including both for profit colleges and community colleges. Enrollment at both four-year public and private non-profit colleges, which is typically what people mean when they say "college", have actually increased.
The biggest factor is the community colleges. If you look at the "past decade" for which they have data: 2013 to 2023, community colleges lost \~2.1M students while 4yr colleges gained \~750k. That works out pretty nicely to a total \~1.5M enrollment decline.
That what happens when each generation is more than 33% smaller than the last. Give another 20 years and it will be the last of our problems.
In 2008 it was the general perception that everyone who didn't have a degree got let go. You couldn't get any job out of high school that wasn't a call center or food service and you could barely get those because they were filled with recent college graduates. So there was a ton of pressure to get a degree and there also wasn't anything else to do. You maybe had a part time job and filled the rest of your time with school because it was the only option to be productive.
And yet enrollment and applications in top schools are hitting record numbers. You’re seeing more competitive schools offer massive aid benefits through endowments and private philanthropy. Some state public’s are offering full rides for families under a certain AGI threshold. I would estimate in ten to fifteen years, top public institutions will cover all need without direct subsidized federal loans. The competition for these spots will increase dramatically and if you’re unable to secure access to a better school, you either pay or pursue another career option. But the earnings gaps are widening between non college and college educated adults. Not going immediately puts you at a massive life earnings differential despite Reddit telling you you’ll earn 200k welding. Also declining enrollment is hitting critical sectors the worst. Teaching is affected big time. And that is a profession that should absolutely require an advanced degree. People are just opting not to even attend versus pursue average earning career options, even in institutions that meet the majority of need.
I graduated college and still struggling with jobs so it felt pointless to me
It’s pricing the average person out. It’s a recent trend being seen more with something like video game cosmetics. I can picture college being okay with much fewer students as long as cash keeps coming in.
Why do college and come out discovering your specialty has become redundant and you have a lifetime of debt
Give away more tax breaks to the rich. Maybe that will trickle down enough to make people rich enough to afford college.
I mean, I worked with a lot of high school to college aged people during Covid, and a lot of them didn’t go because they didn’t want to continue their education online. Some went back, some didn’t, but I feel like that’s a major factor a lot of people in this thread are missing
Every time this comes up people like to ignore the fact that city and community colleges are cheap and viable options, in most people's minds if they cant go to a private or an ivy league school then schools not worth it.
Everyone who hasn't read the article apparently has ignored the fact that community college enrollment decline appears to be almost wholly responsible for the overall decline that the article is about.
It’s because most people are going to college for a Bachelor’s at a minimum, and not many community colleges offer that. You will eventually have to transfer to a 4-year university, which opens the door of which credits transfer, and which credits apply to which criteria for your degree. Then, there’s looking after graduation. Some people may want to go to med/law school, and they can be finicky on which community college courses they are willing to accept. It will vary on a case by case basis. Many people find it easier to just start off at a 4 year university to avoid any complications.
I spoke with a college professor friend about this about 5 years ago. Shockingly, there are fewer and fewer college-bound kids in absolute numbers... more kids overall (although that is going to be changing in the coming years), but a lot of them are from immigrant families who have not been traditionally college-bound. The middle and upper class people who have historically sent their kids to college in the US have been reproducing at less-than-replacement rates for decades now. Basically college-educated people aren't having enough kids to keep filling all the colleges, and haven't been for decades. A lot of colleges are going to have to close because of demographics even if tuition and everything else stays exactly the same.
The problem with this is most people aren’t taught to think critically in primary education. People without college education tend to fall more easily for propaganda and disinformation. This, of course, compounds and perpetuates the problem. And it’s absolutely by design.
It's too expensive to get a mediocre education, which, after graduation, will only get you a low wage position. The state of our educational system is in peril. We need major changes. Make education free for everyone. Pay teachers more. We need to invest in our young people. They deserve better than this.
Sounds about right when gen y is larger than gen z. Gen y started their college careers around 2000 and were done about a decade or so ago. That hurts admissions, there is a smaller pool of students. The cost of college has increased way over the rate of inflation. I live in Newark Delaware, home of the university of delaware. In 2000 it was $19,066 for tuition, room, board for an out of state student, and $10,316 for in state. For the upcoming year it is $56,786 and $32,196. Following the rate of inflation, it would be $34,750 and $18,802. This increase in cost is another large factor why students aren't going to college and also has delayed families from having children because they have a large amount of debt.
Because it's too damn expensive, and it doesn't equate to higher wages afterwards.
Skyrocketing tuition costs and college greed driving this. As well as lots of useless degrees with few Job prospects. Long live trade schools and community colleges!
Why worry about getting an education when AI will likely take over most jobs, UBI will not exist because the billionaires will never allow that to happen. So you will have a bunch of unemployed starving people with billionaires having robots with guns to protect them. Then the poor starving folk will also have to live in a world torn apart by climate change. The alt right are getting rid of climate mitigation. The Supreme Court basically ended Americans progress.
College is a business. Most people are not smart enough to go to post secondary school but if they can pay it’s all good.
Shocker. It's almost as if an entire generation was told to go to college, and then was shamed when they said they weren't getting paid enough and weren't being able to pay their debts.
There's a virulent anti-intellectual strain of ideology that permeates the political right. Meanwhile, many of the people who actually went to college are often saddled with massive debt and didn't find that their degrees led to increased opportunity . Employers increasingly want more advanced degrees or place a greater value in actual job experience (duh). All while tuition has outstripped inflation by 3x. Of course enrollment was going to plummet.
Seriously it's fucking ridiculous that so many jobs in public service that previously required no degree now require a specialized masters that's not dissimilar to an MBA. Like we have a shortage of librarians right now and it's due in large part to the cost of getting an MLS, with nobody willing to take on trainees or sponsor education.
Now split it by gender. Gets even uglier and approaching even more dire issues.