alt Hacker NewsPlunging US Birth Rate Leaves Too Many Colleges with Too Few Kids
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"Peak College" has passed. The first and second tier colleges will still do fine but many of the third tier colleges are doomed. They'll have to reinvent themselves as trade schools or corporate training centers or something if they want to survive. The job market for tenure track professors will get even tougher.
Maybe someday there will be more attention paid to adults. Every aspect of college seems built for 18 year olds.
Surprised because I learned today UT Austin had so many applications(100K) that they can only issue 25% admissions and had to put off the rest 75% for one extra month. It made me feel college is still "crowded" to me.
It is crazy to see how much the birth rates dropped after the recession and how that is finally hurting colleges. I guess a lot of the smaller schools will just have to close if they cannot find enough students to enroll.
I recently moved to a rural home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
I socialize with a bunch of current and former college professors, and they've all remarked on this phenomenon for nearby UVA and Virginia Tech. Interestingly, the one university in the area that is not impacted is the Christian fundamentalist Liberty University. The demographic that attends that school come from a high birth rate subculture. BYU is also not having an issue.
In fact, Liberty has had to expand. I'm not a fan of religious education, but I also think that ALL university tuitions are vastly overpriced to fund the absurdly overpaid and bloated armies of administrators. This includes my alma mater Virginia Tech.
The US birth rate was steady from 1990 to 2010.
I also have no idea how you can legitimately claim to predict the birth rate. There is a trend to be sure but it's driven by several factors so this "heartwrenching" prognostication is ridiculous.
Meanwhile consider the value of a degree over the past 30 years. Colleges got sloppy and relied on the largess of the student loan program and not any genuine forward looking management, the degrees became lower quality, and the value to a graduate plummeted. Plus the Internet exists and has wide penetration throughout the US.
This is lame misguided fear mongering apologia. On brand for Bloomberg.
Pretty soon we'll call trying to have children "giving it the old college try."
Maybe they’ll you know, lower their prices so more people can afford it. Haha.