Population Decline is Going to Hurt Higher Education
This is a problem that is only just beginning. It’s going to get a lot worse.
NPR reports:
A looming ‘demographic cliff’: Fewer college students and ultimately fewer graduatesThis “demographic cliff” has been predicted ever since Americans started having fewer babies at the advent of the Great Recession around the end of 2007 — a falling birth rate that has not recovered since, except for a slight blip after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Demographers say it will finally arrive nationwide in the fall of this year. That’s when recruiting offices will begin to confront the long-anticipated drop-off in the number of applicants from among the next class of high school seniors.But the downturn isn’t just a problem for universities and colleges. It’s a looming crisis for the economy, with fewer graduates eventually coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, even as international rivals increase the proportions of their populations with degrees.”The impact of this is economic decline,” Jeff Strohl, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, says bluntly.As fresh data emerges, the outlook is getting only worse. An analysis by the higher education consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz, using the latest available census figures, now projects another drop in the number of 18-year-olds beginning in 2033, after a brief uptick. By 2039, this estimate shows, there will likely be 650,000, or 15%, fewer of them per year than there are now.These findings sync up with another new report, released in December by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), which says that the number of 18-year-olds nationwide who graduate from high school each year — and are therefore candidates for college — will erode by 13%, or nearly half a million, by 2041.”A few hundred thousand per year might not sound like a lot,” Strohl says. “But multiply that by a decade, and it has a big impact.”
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