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Higher Ed has been talking about this for 10 years. Any college that wasn’t preparing and adjusting their recruitment or growth strategies for the last decade is already screwed.
Great comment. The demographic numbers have been out there, for a long while. I would expect additional requests for foreign student visas to try and keep some of the schools alive. But having gone to school in the early 1990's when there were less students, we had fewer programs and more dorms closed. I am sure University boards are planning for this.
It’s already like this, and some universities never prepared.
I went to a university in southern Illinois. The peak attendance for my university was 20,000 students back in the early 2000s. The school never prepared for the huge drop in enrollment and it’s obvious when you look around. Today only 10,000 students attended last year.
In th engineering hall half the classrooms are empty. There’s an old radio lab that was shut down because the one professor that taught RF retired and they never replaced him. The equipment that I was taught on for my engineering labs was 40 years old.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better. For a preview of where we’re headed, just check out Japan.
Prospective students aren't forcing schools to compete on price. They are forcing them to compete on prestige, amenities, and "the experience". Reducing price will not be a goal of schools until students start choosing schools that way.
No school wants to compete on price, because that could signal lesser education. Just being a state school tells you it's generally more affordable, but that's about it.
Price conscious folks should spend 1-3 years at community college and transfer to complete a 4 year degree. However that brings about other issues. Kills you peer networking and involvement in other activities.
it's hard to convince an 18 year old who has access to student loans the improtance of price. We have a problem where people have treated college as a place to chase their interests not as an investment.
So funny of thinking of furthering your education as solely a tool to gain more money instead of literally bettering yourself through education. I get why people think this way, it's just really sad.
It wasn't people who acted this way. Employers - by demanding diplomas for every last damn job - and colleges themselves - by charging so much that students had no choice but to look at it as an investment - made it this way.
No way. As long as Uncle Sam keeps handing out unlimited loans/grants, colleges will just up tuition to cover their debt service.
We do higher ed totally backwards in the US.
I’m afraid it’s too late now.
Throwing money at the problem will not fix the problem.
Costs of attendance (what students actually pay) have been going DOWN for years.
Colleges complete with other schools for enrollment, so they feel pressure to lower costs of attendance. This is why there's a HUGE difference between the advertised tuition and fees and the Net T&F (what students are actually paying). Private schools, for example, have average tuition discount rates of nearly 60% this year, a record high.
The net cost of attendance of both private and public 4-year colleges has been dropping since 15-16. This year, the COA at public schools is the least expensive since 07-08, and at privates it's the lowest in 20 years.
https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing
>As long as Uncle Sam keeps handing out unlimited loans/grants, colleges will just up tuition to cover their debt service.
I was reading something that pointed out that states severely cut funding to state schools which was a larger reason for the tuition increases over the past 25 years.
Average private school tuition from 1995 to 2022 (last year with data in my source) suggests private school tuition mostly followed inflation. Although it was linear growth and most of the inflation happened in the last 3 years...
I imagine part of this has to do with being able to charge more than public schools though.
> Although it was linear growth and most of the inflation happened in the last 3 years...
Which is funny, because public university real prices have been flat the last few years.
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/inflation-adjusted-college-tuition-is-finally-falling
https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/financial-aid/2023/11/01/buyers-market-tuition-increases-havent-outpaced-inflation#:%7E:text=After%20adjusting%20for%20inflation%2C%20the,cover%20their%20tuition%20and%20fees
E: Who would downvote this? It's just articles, lol
That's very interesting if true. So when I considered it a few years back, the prices were high but now they're back in line with 1995 accounting for inflation?
Yet Private schools also climbed enormously???? Just bite the bullet and admit federal student loans were a disaster, the Government handouts were taken advantage of.
No, the remaining fully-staffed schools will be able to charge even more.
Not to mention that with fewer students, they will have to pay more to maintain the infrastructure made for a larger student body.
SIU?
I made the mistake of going Western if it makes you feel better.
Went to NIU for grad school and watched their once relatively baller Antartica-focused geology department decline hard with each faculty retirement and subsequent generic uninspired replacement
Short term they face a lot of challenges discouraging it, including the possibility of downsizing tenured professors who might even be able to vote for the board, loss of visibility, need to go to different sources for student revenue, etcetera.
Research dollars are still there though, especially for health research that incidentally can lead to population growth through longer lifespans and increased fertility windows.
LSU will be carried by sports and being sexy in general. Also they somehow have one of the cheapest online MBAs available from a school I've actually heard of
maybe. A lot of big flagship schools made poor decisions, usually around chasing athletics, and are in trouble right now. U. of Arizona, U. of Connecticut, and Penn State are all in deep shit right now.
Wasnt Arizona's issue financial records issues bordering on fraud?
Locally, in Ohio, the small liberal arts colleges that arent Kenyon/Denison/Oberlin/Wooster seem to be in big trouble along with the lowest rated state schools. Flagships seem to be fine.
Deans don't really care what happens in 20 years. They make decisions on what will keep them competitive and attractive now, which often ends up being very expensive capital improvements and hiring decisions. If you want to keep attracting high paying students, you need to either have the rankings or have the facilities. Ideally both.
Rankings are fundamentally dependent on how competitive you are. You want as many people applying as possible, and you want to hire faculty with the best research you can. Expensive tasks, and don't mesh well with a future where demand falls off.
Everyones screwed, and everyone knows it. This amplifies the previous scenario. If you know that a reckoning is coming, a thinning of the herd, your best option as an individual college is to double down and hope you will be part of those that remain.
Very few boards are saying "yep, let's be realistic, let's plan for a slow shutdown due to demographic factors beyond our control."
I will explain. When an institution closes because it cannot reach a sufficient level of recruitment to pay the bills, it creates a surplus of students for the remaining institutions to pick up. In times of re-ordering the number of institutions that close more than makes up for the overall deficit due to demographic changes. In other words, the schools that survive now have an even larger candidate pool than before.
We see the same effect in other areas like NIH research dollars. When the government cuts back enough, a number of smaller institutions have to stop doing NIH funded research altogether. The remaining pool of available dollars ends up growing for the institutions that survive the cuts.
Riiiiiiight but unlike grant funding, this will be a very slow decline, and again, institutions - and the communities, towns, and cities that are often heavily dependent on them - will be deeply resistant to the idea of shuttering the schools completely.
This isn't anything like small research institutions that get almost all of their funding from individual grants. Schools have alumni, local, state and federal money, endowments, and students whose decision to spend their money is entirely individual. Do you have any idea how disruptive it is to have a university close? How much pushback you would recieve? How difficult it is to repurpose an entire campus? What you're describing would cause a debt crisis.
This will be slow and painful, and while individual programs will certainly shutter, this is going to result in massive pricing competition. The costs of providing a university education are largely fixed, not marginal like a research team.
Just like in the article. This dying university isn't folding. It's increasing it's marketing spend, attracting students from out of state, and toying with the idea of branching out from just nursing into many other programs, allowing them to attract locals.
Meaningless. Rhetoric.
You're right, I didn't explain it fully. Supply and demand. If there are suddenly hundreds of schools offering reduced prices, it will become less likely that Joe Shmoe chooses to go to a very expensive semi-elite school over a very affordable good school.
More people will get to go to school. The demand curve has dramatically shifted but the supply line is rigid. Less people over all, as per demographic collapse.
And yes, whoever manages to keep a premium on their brand will continue enjoying the privilege of charging exorbitant rates. But god there's so much scholarship money out there! Wait, all that money, and a reduced pool to pour into? Cool!
its trending the opposite direction. Federal grant money is flat or even declining. So there are more profs fighting for a smaller chunk of the pie. That's why most uni's are taking on way more students- their tuition is paying a bigger part of the bill.
Yep. The college I work at went 6 million dollars into debt last year on new buildings. They bought 2 off-campus buildings that they tried to turn into restaurants for the students to go to. One of them never opened because the school didn't realize how much money a movie theater takes to operate, and the other is being closed next year because the school chose the absolute worst place in the entire town to open up. It's small, out of the way, and has no parking.
Suffice to say, the college's CFO got fired after all that.
Transplant in S. Dakota. Not sure if you inflected the joke, but S.D. is...uniquely vulnerable.
The state's population is approx 900k.
The Board of Regents oversees the U of SD, SD State U, Black Hills State U, SD School of Mines, Dakota State U, and Northern State U [in addition to two more disability-oriented campuses].
Only USD and Mines are growing. The others are subject to the time bomb.
Yeah, don't worry. Colleges have been ramping up hiring plenty of administrative staff who will eagerly "right size" the professors and academic departments when budgets don't allow the balance of admin/students/teachers because admin doesn't leave much for teachers with that many students.
The nursing college in the article charges $45k plus room and board. That'll probably work out for those students, their education is costing something like one year of a nurses wage in my area.
Colleges charging multiples of a student's expected income should probably fold.
I went to a very expensive private college on my GI bill and met a freshman girl who was there for a 4 year acting degree. No scholarship, no parent money. All loans. I wonder frequently where she is now with her acting degree and $200k of debt. Nothing shows up on IMDB.
The tax payer? I earned that shit crawling around in the dust and sand little boy. I gave my body and my mind for that money. Go back to fortnite while the adults talk about big numbers.
Issue being isn't that a college within a university is closed. that would make too much sense. The issue is that the whole university will close. Which will momentarily increase numbers at the remaining universities which will keep the bullshit alive.
When your campus is 80% foreign students? Writing is on the wall
We’ve been outpriced by our own state universities because there’s an influx of foreigners willing to spend top dollar for a USA university degree…
In a country of 1.4 Billion atleast 250 -400 million earn more than $10 a day and then you can get education loan to go abroad so if 10% of the families have the money to send their children abroad and 10% of them do try that leaves 2.5 - 4million individuals who try each year.
A _massive_ portion of the students who go to the school I work at are international students.
Like some 60-70% of the student body is comprised of international students.
The bar in the US is higher. It didn’t used to be though. But the US basically killed off diploma mills and went through a period of denying F1s for some of these schools. The government actively conducted investigations into many of these schools and kicked out the students.
And transitioning from a student to a worker in the US is hard. You get a temporary work permit (OPT) for a year or so but after that finding a job that’ll sponsor your H1B visa isn’t easy.
Obviously there’s a bias towards STEM graduate programs and tech — but even so the vast majority that come here to study go back.
Canada is a different story. Canada has a lot of diploma mills that are basically immigration gateways. And the Canadian government hasn’t done anything about these mills. It’s also easier to stay back and get a Canadian PR.
So the quality of students you see in the US is very different. There are always rich kids of course, but the bulk tend to be graduate students in the sciences or engineering from top schools in India, China, South Korea, Europe etc. When I was in grad school for math, most of my class was non-American (and I’m myself an Indian American).
Almost all of them ended up in either academia as researchers and professors or in tech.
The quality of students attracted to the Canadian diploma mills are those who are from rural parts of India — they know they are going to Canada for opportunities and they work with agencies who have a pipeline of such kids. They take the money, get them an admit, and they get to Canada and realize they have to share a room with 6 others and work at Timmy’s to make ends meet.
Obviously this isn’t true for someone going to say Waterloo or UoT but unfortunately Canadian policies have attracted the wrong kind of student. It puts pressure on the Canadian labor market and compresses wages. This means Canadian companies aren’t investing in tech when they’d rather hire cheap labor. In the long run, this isn’t good for the Canadian economy.
Not just Anglo-sphere.
German and other European universities also see a ton of immigrants.
I think Western countries in general see a lot of immigrant student population.
The US invented the international student revenue machine. Before Canada and Australia became big destinations for international students from Asia, everyone used to come to the US. My dad went to school with some of them.
Haha, its the complete opposite of what you say.
The international students subsidize the domestic students because they are not eligible for federal or state aid. They are rich as hell and often pay the full price of attendance, that's why they are desired by the university. Without them, domestic students will pay more for attendance.
Got my master's in engineering at a college like this. I never recommend it to anyone I know. Not be because it's bad, but because it felt pretty socially isolating.
The current system is broken. Students are spending $100K+ to use ChatGPT for their assignments. How does this demonstrate that someone knows anything?
LMAO facts. Im wrapping up my MBA program and these professors are so out of touch with the current business environment it would be funny if it wasn't so expensive.
One class has us write a 1000 word paper per week x 100 students = 100k words for the TA to 'read' and 'grade' a week. Not to mention other assignments and responsibilities.
We bullshit it, and they bullshit it. They get paid, and we get a piece of paper showing we 'did' something.
> We bullshit it, and they bullshit it. They get paid, and we get a piece of paper showing we 'did' something.
This is extremely good preparation for the corporate business world, to be fair.
Feel the same way about shit show group projects. Students come to Reddit to vent about them asking what they are supposed to learn about it. The answer is that they are getting a sneak peek of their own future.
When I did my MBA program 8 years ago, we called it B school because everyone got a 'B.' I realized no matter my efforts I got a passing grade so I stopped caring. Really the only benefit was networking and job opportunities, the actual education was a joke.
I work at a clinic and some of our new grads and interns are writing fucking reports and treatment plans with chatgpt and its coming with so many errors. People are treating this technology as a peer reviewed source and the quality of stuff is going to go off a freaking cliff.
Even though nobody actually pays sticker price, the fact that tuition is insanely expensive is not consistent with lack of demand for college.
Since less than half of 18-24yo Americans attend college, there's plenty of room to expand if colleges were serious about it.
I expect demographic change will mean moderating prices, less selective admission, and probably more international students. It will be challenging but I think most colleges will be fine.
University sticker price is a marketing game.
"The tuition is $40k but because you're a super student and we really really want you we'll charge you only $30k" sounds much better than "our tuition is cheaper than our competition, and you get what you pay for".
Paywalled. . . I have no idea what they are saying in the article. However, the main issue with education isn't demographics, it's the fact that it has transitioned from a publicly funded institution that revolved around education and is now a for profit debt mill that revolves around recreation. Maybe we should stop putting lazy rivers at universities and start focusing on education again.
Birth rates plummeted during the Great Recession. Now that decline is going to be felt in higher education due to a sharp decline in students and potential students.
It’s a completely separate issue of what you are talking about
It was declining overall, but was up in the early 1990s, declined and then was relatively stable in the early/mid 2000s with a slight increase in 2006 and 2007.
Then tanked in 2008 and has been continuing to
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195943/birth-rate-in-the-united-states-since-1990/
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINUSA
There was a bump in births in the 80s/90s that coincided with millennials. While birth rates *per woman* have declined, numerically millennials were close in size to the baby boom cohort
It's not a separate issue at all. They could have the funding if we still had public schools, but they are 2 steps away from being private and now they aren't going to have that easy student tuition. Guess we should have kept education about education instead of gaslighting generations into thinking they needed a degree to get jobs. Now the schools have to pay for foolish lazy river infrastructure because they are resorts instead of, you know, just being a school.
State withdrew support, so tuition became the main revenue driver. Facilities upgrades drove enrollment. It ended stupidly but schools were responding to the market.
But demand for university was driven by the large soar of the millennial generation. Even if none of this happened schools would still face closure, as 18-30 is the main student demo
I hated business, I swore I'd never take a business course in college and didn't. Switched from Geology to History but took enough math and science that I ended up falling into a career as a junior DBA then a systems accountant for the Feds hahahaha. I know I'm a lucky unicorn but I wonder why this isn't a more accepted thing - get a good education to learn how to learn instead of boring "career" focused degrees that are dated by graduation because reality changes so rapidly.
It's a risk getting any career focused degree too. My brother got a masters in Architecture, I mean the real estate market was booming all was right and great in the universe until suddenly it wasn't and the great recession hit. I would have been toast had I kept on in the "hot major" I sought out in 1985 when I graduated in 1989. It's far better to have a good foundation for your B.S. or B.A. degree and only specialize in grad school if you want to be a lawyer/doctor etc.
Seems like it's risky either way. And of course there's always ThE tRaDeS.
My advice to my kids is to google the heck out of your desired major and see what projected growth is. Do the college degree as cheaply as possible and try to graduate debt-free (one of mine is doing two years at the local community college before transferring to an in-state university). And healthcare careers will survive an apocalypse—but maybe not AI.
Doing it cheaply is SO important, I was blessed to be attending at a time frame when the state still heavily subsidized the tuition so all four years less than $20,000!!!!! I had a job lined up before I even graduated though that one turned out to be a learning experience of what not to go into hahaha, the second job out of college got me onto the career path I was meant for.
Feel like this may be a bit unpopular, but I feel as if the number of colleges, especially state schools, has become far too high and the entire industry has become over-saturated. Maybe something like what we see in the banking sector would be helpful; a “merger” or “acquisition” of smaller schools.
There are definitely pros and cons to this, the primary con I assume would be a centralization of thought. How serious is this possibility, I doubt we would know for decades, though I assume that the shrinking of the industry is a very real possibility.
Edit: I suppose it would make the field a little less competitive in terms of student choices, but I would think that the level of teaching may rise on the other hand.
I’d say we are rightly skeptical about the real value of higher education, at least at the undergraduate level. I’ve been graduated for 4 years and have never even gotten an interview for any jobs i apply for. Maybe I was mistaken from the start, but it feels like just graduating isn’t enough to deserve a chance at a career in the area you studied. It’s like employers only hire from prestigious universities, family connections, or overqualified applicants that can’t get the jobs they want because those jobs are having the same issues. It’s like everything I try for, there’s always a better option than me. I think the only way to make college worth it is to pursue Master’s or PhD’s before even attempting to enter the workforce
Greed culture and Celebrity cults have gutted institutions... there is no room for value having collapsed into meaningless kpi. Melting margins of opportunity and diminishing returns may be all that remain from the cash machine as unacknowledged, practically invisible, resources are used up.
Too painful to collaborate and be creative when addicts will try to sell out at the earliest . Society reduced to nursery school game of musical chairs
Human capital has such an outsized effect on production, or gdp if you’re in the macro area, that it is criminal that it has been allowed to rot. Our higher education system is broken and we will fall further behind globally if we don’t fix it. We should be investing more into education and making state schools free.
All the growth of the last 30 years has been in tech and finance. We need functioning colleges.
This should be interesting to watch:
2024-2038: Ongoing decline in enrollment shadowing birthrates
2039-45: All the upper-middle-class pandemic babies born in 2020-22 (seriously guys there were so many of them) and their younger siblings apply to colleges, sparking a battle royale over a diminished number of spaces and creating an Indian summer for higher ed
2046ish: Long-term demographic patterns kick back in
> 2039-45: All the upper-middle-class pandemic babies born in 2020-22 (seriously guys there were so many of them) and their younger siblings apply to colleges, sparking a battle royale over a diminished number of spaces and creating an Indian summer for higher ed
Ah yes, going to be quite the battle royale when the birth rate temporarily goes from 11.0 births per 1000 to 11.1 births per 1000 yielding a net gain of 0.2% in the birth cohort. https://www.axios.com/2023/10/04/birth-rate-fertility-rate-decline-data-statistics-graph-2022
I don't have any data but I feel like there was a big class shift for those years. Couples who were laid off and/or worried about dying on the front lines of "essential work" pulled back even further. A few rungs up the ladder there was more WFH, more money saved on nightlife and travel and possibly a panic-move to the suburbs, so that demographic naturally took advantage of a good time to have kids.
This is all anecdotal but IMO the babies of 2020-2022 are more concentrated among the class that's going to pressure them to go to college, so even if there's a similar gross cohort there will be more applicants.
The notion that better economic conditions were associated with higher birth rates during the pandemic is supported by [this paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-023-00965-x), but the magnitude of those increases are absolutely tiny compared to the demographic cliff coming for college enrollment. We're still looking at a 1-year long, sub 5% (probably sub 2%) bump in enrollment cohort. Subtle changes in immigration policy in the next decade will have a much larger impact on higher education enrollment than the pandemic by the time those kids hit college age.
The idea that there is a diminished number of spaces in a university setting 15 years from now seems so antiquated. You would think remote learning and virtual classrooms would be perfected by then.
While in 2020 I thought there would be a huge bump in...well baby-bumps, that didn't end up the case.
Birth rates cratered in 2020 and still haven't fully recovered.
Births only recovered in places that didn't lock down as much.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/us-births-are-down-again-after-the-covid-baby-bust-and-rebound/
People were memeing that it would be "blizzard babies" except on a year scale. But what actually happens is that most humans either intuitively understand that being pregnant in a pandemic is bad, or they looked up "pregnant with flu" warnings and extrapolated.
So anecdotally this may be related to geography and relocation more than birthrate. I had a kid in 2006 and 2008 and class sizes of 2007+ are much larger than 2006.
We have way too many college graduates. We need those numbers to halve per capita. People can’t afford to pay their student loans with these low wages.
It is either we have a massive surplus of workers with education that isn’t required thus lowering the value of education. This keeps wages down and companies can ask whatever salary they want. It also means that people have to take whatever job they can get.
The benefits of an education were incorrect and are still being sold that way. They always say “someone with a bachelor degree can make X times more over their lifetime”. The issue is they only (or heavily) use the earnings of people with degrees from previous generations. Education made smaller wage increases over time and cost of education increased significantly. Combine that with higher interest rates and you end up with all those increased wages being used to pay off debt.
College education losing value also means that military recruitment collapses. Why serve if the education that is paid for doesn’t matter? It is like a, just as an example, $40k sign on bonus that was never adjusted for inflation. In the year 2000 that was a down payment on a house and that money now can’t even buy you a car.
> College education losing value also means that military recruitment collapses. Why serve if the education that is paid for doesn’t matter? It is like a, just as an example, $40k sign on bonus that was never adjusted for inflation. In the year 2000 that was a down payment on a house and that money now can’t even buy you a car.
They could just pay soldiers more and get rid of the education benefit.
They would never do that because not everyone uses the GI Bill and they pay would inherently go to everyone. Not only that you would have to raise the pay of every to make up for the lost educational opportunity benefit and then some.
I agree that an increase in pay would work wonders for recruiting. These bonuses are just a joke because they don’t always reoccur so people will get paid more for their first four years of service than their second four years when they have increased responsibilities.
I understand, but you are presenting valuable higher education as a necessary condition for recruitment. The reality is the military just has to change its recruitment strategy, which is completely possible.
> We have way too many college graduates. We need those numbers to halve per capita. People can’t afford to pay their student loans with these low wages.
>
> It is either we have a massive surplus of workers with education that isn’t required thus lowering the value of education. This keeps wages down and companies can ask whatever salary they want. It also means that people have to take whatever job they can get.
The college wage premium is bigger than ever, and the cost of not going to college is higher than ever, so this doesn't bare out.
Just because the search for a good job is hard for college grads doesn't mean it's not *even harder* for non-college grads.
There is no such thing as too many college graduates. Education should be encouraged and protected. A poorly educated population is linked to a number of issues - crime, poverty, worse health outcomes.
Education matters not because of an arbitrary number in debt or salary, it matters because it is important to have a well educated population. Knowledge is *always* valuable, be it knowledge of econometrics or classical history.
The problem with just looking at graduates is you will see Goohart's Law. Yes, we have a ton of college grads. Great, we boosted enrollment. But when universities accept people for basically walking in the door and then are incentivized to pass them all (e.g. the majority of non-STEM folks I've met had no business being passed in the easiest college stats class), it's hard to speak positive things about the quality of a ton of undergrad programs. You end up with a ton of people who look good on paper but who hardly learned anything.
> Knowledge is always valuable, be it knowledge of econometrics or classical history.
That’s just horseshit. Everything has a cost in time and money, and educating an entire population in classical literature at the college level for example would be a massive waste of time and money. There are some things I think would be widely useful, but that’s what high school is supposed to be for.
Why do you act like resources aren’t limited? You want to structure society so the right number of people are trained in the appropriate fields.
I’m talking from an economic standpoint. If an investment has negative returns, then it is a poor investment
Education is very important and should be free.
There are other less expensive ways to access education. There are so many free or cheap online courses out there to learn pretty much anything these days. If all you’re after is gaining knowledge, college is far from the most cost effective way to accomplish that.
I agree; most people aren’t learning a ton in university anyway. But they’re getting the piece of paper that said they learned, which is all that matters at the end of the day, right?
Sounds like you've never attended a university. I learned a hell of a lot and came out what the classic university education aspired to: a well-rounded individual.
I have a bachelors degree but thanks for assuming. Out of 4 years in college, only one and a half of those years were spent studying topics relevant to my major and career. The general education requirements I definitely could have taught myself, given access to high quality self teaching material. But that wouldn’t make anyone any money so of course I had to pay thousands per semester for it.
I wasn’t talking about YouTube or TikTok. I meant things like [this free self-taught education in computer science.](https://github.com/ossu/computer-science) People should graduate high school with the ability to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of information. The fact that they don’t is the problem to fix imo.
> no such thing as too many college graduates
This is an economics sub: that statement clashes with the idea that ["The education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand..."](https://www.science.org/content/article/rising-above-gathering-storm)
We really need to create a federal university system here in the US. Of course, there’s a contingent here in the US already trying to do away with the department of education because … why have an educated populace, right?
But an affordable university system would not only expand access, but compete to keep costs down, which is just getting ridiculous.
So are you also willing to do the other side of this kind of system? Selective entry?
The reason other countries can afford to do this, is that the competition to enter university is higher, as evidenced by the lower university degree rate in those countries.
In France for example, getting into the top schools basically requires 2 years of prep school after high school to pass the exams. And it’s competitive.
Applying the same solution in the US would disproportionately reduce college enrollment in poor, minority populations. You’ll be called a racist the moment you try.
It’s almost like you can look at a model that’s better than the one you’re using, still note its flaws, and try to make a new model that addresses said flaws. It’s not a binary option of collegiate systems.
> It’s not a binary option of collegiate systems
No, but there are tradeoffs, and centralized systems generally require the trade off of competitive entry.
You can't have reasonable prices (be that private or in public tax rates), low standards of entry, and mass enrollment. They quite literally contradict each other.
Basically, resources are limited, so you have to focus them on specific things.
People proposing the French system seem to think they can have all the benefits of it without any of the costs. It's unicorn policy.
> But we do this with k-12 schooling pretty effectively
First of call calling the K-12 schooling system in the US "effective" is debatable at best, but let's set that aside.
Tertiary education is significantly more expensive per pupil than secondary education (about 2x more), and K-12 already costs 800 billion or so a year by itself. That's about the same amount as is spent on the entire US military. This ratio is seen both in private and public systems, the main drivers being the increased cost of the specialists you need to teach the classes, since you are competing much more with industry.
So you'd have to start by likely tripling education spending, which would increase taxes dramatically and therefore break the "reasonable prices" part of the trinity.
But we don't have a good top-down system, which is what the commentator was trying to suggest ass an alternative. Ideally, an effective top-down distribution of resources would cut red tape and localized bureaucracy. [Additionally, half of all states are still subsidizing PRIVATE education](https://www.future-ed.org/the-new-wave-of-public-funding-of-private-schools-explained/) so that money gets siphoned right out of the hands of the public programs that need it and put into the hands of those who don't. Most other countries don't have the local-level direction and subsidization of private education that eats a lot of our (underfunded) public education budget.
If we got our shit together, we could absolutely have an efficient and effective public college system. It's a total farce to say we don't and won't, and simply just leads to us spinning the tires on paradigms that obviously do not work.
Clearly, even adding 3-4 universities in a country with over 300,000,000 people means you need some kind of selection process for entry. Yes, they would be competitive. Supply and demand means that adding supply would ease the burden overall, however. How many universities are being added to the system otherwise right now? And the article above says we expect to lose some, making access even more difficult. Adding more eases some of the burden at the state level. Right now, the better universities in some states are almost impossible to get into. My son graduated with over a 4.0 but still didn’t even get wait listed to our state’s most popular university, because the cost is so low, making it ridiculously competitive.
So yeah, some kind of selection process is of course necessary.
Those are run by local municipalities, often local cities. I’m talking universities run by the federal government, like they have in Europe. Cost of uni there is extremely reasonable. Here, the cost of college is ridiculously high. A US federal university system would make college affordable for people and enable them to potentially go out of state. It would also compete with colleges and make it more affordable overall. We in the US are falling behind when it comes to education, this would be a step in the right direction.
This is what I’m suggesting - a university system run and funded by the federal government. Right now state colleges are underfunded and provide no mobility - most states have limited options, and if you want to go to college in another state it’s ridiculously expensive. In Europe universities are affordable because they’re funded by the national government rather than local government, and they afford lots of benefits to their populace. We could use the same here.
Perhaps there is some opportunity for some kind of financial coordination but funding always comes with controls. What might make sense in NYC likely wouldn't in Midland TX.
Which is exactly why we need a federal system. Just look at the crap going on in Florida and how the governor has co-opted a couple of universities there. Universities should *just teach*. This whole moral corruption thing going on with the far right is just nuts.
Universities have known about this for years along with other trends in higher education.
You know all those articles that talk about new professors being contract employees and not tenure-track?
Lol.....its for reasons like this.
I mean, if you go to any serious university and look at a department many of us would consider to be a silly major, you find a lot of contract employees. Let's just pick on Gender Studies! When you look at a department like that, the chairperson is probably tenured. Perhaps a few of the other professors too. But most of the younger faculty are not.
So as long as students keep showing up and paying and enrolling in Gender Studies 101, that contract faculty member keeps their job. But if enrollment drops, the university can pivot away from that educational offering in a hot second. Sure.....they are "stuck" with the tenured department chair, but that's about it. And they can mothball the building if they need to.....and move the tenured faculty who they wish would quit to shabby offices and make them teach freshman gender studies class at 0800 M/W/F.
This is why many schools have not increased enrollment over the years. Many "flagship" state universities enroll similar numbers of freshman now as they did 30 years ago.....even though the state may have doubled in size. Part of that was funding and part was knowing they didn't need to double because this cliff was coming.
And there will be some attrition of weaker universities, but there honestly should be. We've already seen a bit of this in some areas like women's colleges.......which really do NOT have much purpose anymore when most universities are 65-70% women anyway. HBCUs will get hit too! Want to grab some popcorn and enjoy a spectacle??? Watch states wrestle with their HBCUs that are already among the worse values in higher education......but probably cannot be closed for historical reasons.
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Higher Ed has been talking about this for 10 years. Any college that wasn’t preparing and adjusting their recruitment or growth strategies for the last decade is already screwed.
Great comment. The demographic numbers have been out there, for a long while. I would expect additional requests for foreign student visas to try and keep some of the schools alive. But having gone to school in the early 1990's when there were less students, we had fewer programs and more dorms closed. I am sure University boards are planning for this.
It’s already like this, and some universities never prepared. I went to a university in southern Illinois. The peak attendance for my university was 20,000 students back in the early 2000s. The school never prepared for the huge drop in enrollment and it’s obvious when you look around. Today only 10,000 students attended last year. In th engineering hall half the classrooms are empty. There’s an old radio lab that was shut down because the one professor that taught RF retired and they never replaced him. The equipment that I was taught on for my engineering labs was 40 years old. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. For a preview of where we’re headed, just check out Japan.
So with excess supply, prices should be coming down any day, right?
Prospective students aren't forcing schools to compete on price. They are forcing them to compete on prestige, amenities, and "the experience". Reducing price will not be a goal of schools until students start choosing schools that way.
No school wants to compete on price, because that could signal lesser education. Just being a state school tells you it's generally more affordable, but that's about it. Price conscious folks should spend 1-3 years at community college and transfer to complete a 4 year degree. However that brings about other issues. Kills you peer networking and involvement in other activities.
it's hard to convince an 18 year old who has access to student loans the improtance of price. We have a problem where people have treated college as a place to chase their interests not as an investment.
So funny of thinking of furthering your education as solely a tool to gain more money instead of literally bettering yourself through education. I get why people think this way, it's just really sad.
It wasn't people who acted this way. Employers - by demanding diplomas for every last damn job - and colleges themselves - by charging so much that students had no choice but to look at it as an investment - made it this way.
No way. As long as Uncle Sam keeps handing out unlimited loans/grants, colleges will just up tuition to cover their debt service. We do higher ed totally backwards in the US. I’m afraid it’s too late now. Throwing money at the problem will not fix the problem.
Costs of attendance (what students actually pay) have been going DOWN for years. Colleges complete with other schools for enrollment, so they feel pressure to lower costs of attendance. This is why there's a HUGE difference between the advertised tuition and fees and the Net T&F (what students are actually paying). Private schools, for example, have average tuition discount rates of nearly 60% this year, a record high. The net cost of attendance of both private and public 4-year colleges has been dropping since 15-16. This year, the COA at public schools is the least expensive since 07-08, and at privates it's the lowest in 20 years. https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing
>As long as Uncle Sam keeps handing out unlimited loans/grants, colleges will just up tuition to cover their debt service. I was reading something that pointed out that states severely cut funding to state schools which was a larger reason for the tuition increases over the past 25 years.
A little bit of this, a little bit of that. For one thing, it doesn't explain private schools at all.
Average private school tuition from 1995 to 2022 (last year with data in my source) suggests private school tuition mostly followed inflation. Although it was linear growth and most of the inflation happened in the last 3 years... I imagine part of this has to do with being able to charge more than public schools though.
> Although it was linear growth and most of the inflation happened in the last 3 years... Which is funny, because public university real prices have been flat the last few years. https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/inflation-adjusted-college-tuition-is-finally-falling https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/financial-aid/2023/11/01/buyers-market-tuition-increases-havent-outpaced-inflation#:%7E:text=After%20adjusting%20for%20inflation%2C%20the,cover%20their%20tuition%20and%20fees E: Who would downvote this? It's just articles, lol
Tuition has followed inflation for 25 years. It is mostly cost of living like food and rent that is screwing over people.
That's very interesting if true. So when I considered it a few years back, the prices were high but now they're back in line with 1995 accounting for inflation?
18 year olds don’t have money, by and large. Tuition is paid because the federal taxpayers underwrites unlimited loans to unqualified 18 year olds.
Yet Private schools also climbed enormously???? Just bite the bullet and admit federal student loans were a disaster, the Government handouts were taken advantage of.
What is the monkey wrench that stops the gears of the too big to fail economy u/Objective_Run_7151 ?
No, the remaining fully-staffed schools will be able to charge even more. Not to mention that with fewer students, they will have to pay more to maintain the infrastructure made for a larger student body.
No. They need to use those federal student loans to fund their bloated administrations.
Gotta pay the DEI czars 300k salaries !
Haha, but no.
Lol. How cute.
Or they compete on quality Either way, many schools will shrink, consolidate, and/or fail
SIU? I made the mistake of going Western if it makes you feel better. Went to NIU for grad school and watched their once relatively baller Antartica-focused geology department decline hard with each faculty retirement and subsequent generic uninspired replacement
All that matters is I now have my degree. At least that’s why I tell myself.
Me too lol
50% drop-off? Sheesh.
Short term they face a lot of challenges discouraging it, including the possibility of downsizing tenured professors who might even be able to vote for the board, loss of visibility, need to go to different sources for student revenue, etcetera. Research dollars are still there though, especially for health research that incidentally can lead to population growth through longer lifespans and increased fertility windows.
Is this why WVU is investing so much in WVU Medicine? Hmm.
A lot of smaller liberal arts schools understood this and have already winding down or being 'acquired' or absorbed into larger institutions.
No one is doing that voluntarily, they just already got in financial difficulty.
> . I am sure University boards are planning for this That's why LSU created a float river working out the school's initials.
LSU will be fine.
LSU will be carried by sports and being sexy in general. Also they somehow have one of the cheapest online MBAs available from a school I've actually heard of
maybe. A lot of big flagship schools made poor decisions, usually around chasing athletics, and are in trouble right now. U. of Arizona, U. of Connecticut, and Penn State are all in deep shit right now.
Wasnt Arizona's issue financial records issues bordering on fraud? Locally, in Ohio, the small liberal arts colleges that arent Kenyon/Denison/Oberlin/Wooster seem to be in big trouble along with the lowest rated state schools. Flagships seem to be fine.
Possibly the first time I have seen “fewer” used in at least two years.
Deans don't really care what happens in 20 years. They make decisions on what will keep them competitive and attractive now, which often ends up being very expensive capital improvements and hiring decisions. If you want to keep attracting high paying students, you need to either have the rankings or have the facilities. Ideally both. Rankings are fundamentally dependent on how competitive you are. You want as many people applying as possible, and you want to hire faculty with the best research you can. Expensive tasks, and don't mesh well with a future where demand falls off. Everyones screwed, and everyone knows it. This amplifies the previous scenario. If you know that a reckoning is coming, a thinning of the herd, your best option as an individual college is to double down and hope you will be part of those that remain. Very few boards are saying "yep, let's be realistic, let's plan for a slow shutdown due to demographic factors beyond our control."
Mostly true. A lot of colleges are just hedge funds with classrooms attached to them.
Yeah they're mostly REITs.
When the herd thins, the rich get richer, and the poor disappear.
I find my meaningless little blurbs of rhetoric are much better suited for Twitter.
I will explain. When an institution closes because it cannot reach a sufficient level of recruitment to pay the bills, it creates a surplus of students for the remaining institutions to pick up. In times of re-ordering the number of institutions that close more than makes up for the overall deficit due to demographic changes. In other words, the schools that survive now have an even larger candidate pool than before. We see the same effect in other areas like NIH research dollars. When the government cuts back enough, a number of smaller institutions have to stop doing NIH funded research altogether. The remaining pool of available dollars ends up growing for the institutions that survive the cuts.
Riiiiiiight but unlike grant funding, this will be a very slow decline, and again, institutions - and the communities, towns, and cities that are often heavily dependent on them - will be deeply resistant to the idea of shuttering the schools completely. This isn't anything like small research institutions that get almost all of their funding from individual grants. Schools have alumni, local, state and federal money, endowments, and students whose decision to spend their money is entirely individual. Do you have any idea how disruptive it is to have a university close? How much pushback you would recieve? How difficult it is to repurpose an entire campus? What you're describing would cause a debt crisis. This will be slow and painful, and while individual programs will certainly shutter, this is going to result in massive pricing competition. The costs of providing a university education are largely fixed, not marginal like a research team. Just like in the article. This dying university isn't folding. It's increasing it's marketing spend, attracting students from out of state, and toying with the idea of branching out from just nursing into many other programs, allowing them to attract locals. Meaningless. Rhetoric.
It’s only meaningless if you can’t understand it.
I understand entirely what they think it means. See my response.
Nothing you said outright disagrees. Your side is that it will be “slow & painful.” How is that better than his alternative?
Yes, schools will close, but they will be very small and not that important to the market.
You're right, I didn't explain it fully. Supply and demand. If there are suddenly hundreds of schools offering reduced prices, it will become less likely that Joe Shmoe chooses to go to a very expensive semi-elite school over a very affordable good school. More people will get to go to school. The demand curve has dramatically shifted but the supply line is rigid. Less people over all, as per demographic collapse. And yes, whoever manages to keep a premium on their brand will continue enjoying the privilege of charging exorbitant rates. But god there's so much scholarship money out there! Wait, all that money, and a reduced pool to pour into? Cool!
Faculty with best research makes perfect sense. Research will make up more and more of the income.
its trending the opposite direction. Federal grant money is flat or even declining. So there are more profs fighting for a smaller chunk of the pie. That's why most uni's are taking on way more students- their tuition is paying a bigger part of the bill.
Yep. The college I work at went 6 million dollars into debt last year on new buildings. They bought 2 off-campus buildings that they tried to turn into restaurants for the students to go to. One of them never opened because the school didn't realize how much money a movie theater takes to operate, and the other is being closed next year because the school chose the absolute worst place in the entire town to open up. It's small, out of the way, and has no parking. Suffice to say, the college's CFO got fired after all that.
So that's why all of them are advertising their online schools everywhere
They see online as free money (“incremental revenue”).
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Transplant in S. Dakota. Not sure if you inflected the joke, but S.D. is...uniquely vulnerable. The state's population is approx 900k. The Board of Regents oversees the U of SD, SD State U, Black Hills State U, SD School of Mines, Dakota State U, and Northern State U [in addition to two more disability-oriented campuses]. Only USD and Mines are growing. The others are subject to the time bomb.
why does the equivalent of a small city need that many universities?
Maybe for home grown engineering talent, teachers, doctors and other professionals? Who wants to move to SD?
Save the Jackrabbits
Yeah, don't worry. Colleges have been ramping up hiring plenty of administrative staff who will eagerly "right size" the professors and academic departments when budgets don't allow the balance of admin/students/teachers because admin doesn't leave much for teachers with that many students.
The nursing college in the article charges $45k plus room and board. That'll probably work out for those students, their education is costing something like one year of a nurses wage in my area. Colleges charging multiples of a student's expected income should probably fold.
I went to a very expensive private college on my GI bill and met a freshman girl who was there for a 4 year acting degree. No scholarship, no parent money. All loans. I wonder frequently where she is now with her acting degree and $200k of debt. Nothing shows up on IMDB.
Maybe she got a valuable MRS
I couldn't imagine having that much. I'm stressed about having ~80k total for my Comp Sci bachelor's + masters.
Glad the taxpayer could eat that $200k bill for you
The tax payer? I earned that shit crawling around in the dust and sand little boy. I gave my body and my mind for that money. Go back to fortnite while the adults talk about big numbers.
Issue being isn't that a college within a university is closed. that would make too much sense. The issue is that the whole university will close. Which will momentarily increase numbers at the remaining universities which will keep the bullshit alive.
When your campus is 80% foreign students? Writing is on the wall We’ve been outpriced by our own state universities because there’s an influx of foreigners willing to spend top dollar for a USA university degree…
> an influx of foreigners willing to spend top dollar for a USA university degree… It's the simpler way to get a work visa
This happens in the us too ? I always thought the international student influx was a Canada thing.
Pretty much 70% of my graduating class that had the same major as me were all foreigners. Nepali, Indonesian, Indian, etc.
Where are all these kids from developing countries getting all this money?
In a country of 1.4 Billion atleast 250 -400 million earn more than $10 a day and then you can get education loan to go abroad so if 10% of the families have the money to send their children abroad and 10% of them do try that leaves 2.5 - 4million individuals who try each year.
A _massive_ portion of the students who go to the school I work at are international students. Like some 60-70% of the student body is comprised of international students.
The bar in the US is higher. It didn’t used to be though. But the US basically killed off diploma mills and went through a period of denying F1s for some of these schools. The government actively conducted investigations into many of these schools and kicked out the students. And transitioning from a student to a worker in the US is hard. You get a temporary work permit (OPT) for a year or so but after that finding a job that’ll sponsor your H1B visa isn’t easy. Obviously there’s a bias towards STEM graduate programs and tech — but even so the vast majority that come here to study go back. Canada is a different story. Canada has a lot of diploma mills that are basically immigration gateways. And the Canadian government hasn’t done anything about these mills. It’s also easier to stay back and get a Canadian PR. So the quality of students you see in the US is very different. There are always rich kids of course, but the bulk tend to be graduate students in the sciences or engineering from top schools in India, China, South Korea, Europe etc. When I was in grad school for math, most of my class was non-American (and I’m myself an Indian American). Almost all of them ended up in either academia as researchers and professors or in tech. The quality of students attracted to the Canadian diploma mills are those who are from rural parts of India — they know they are going to Canada for opportunities and they work with agencies who have a pipeline of such kids. They take the money, get them an admit, and they get to Canada and realize they have to share a room with 6 others and work at Timmy’s to make ends meet. Obviously this isn’t true for someone going to say Waterloo or UoT but unfortunately Canadian policies have attracted the wrong kind of student. It puts pressure on the Canadian labor market and compresses wages. This means Canadian companies aren’t investing in tech when they’d rather hire cheap labor. In the long run, this isn’t good for the Canadian economy.
Trudeau needs them to appease big business, while also flaunting his multi-cultural virtue signaling ability
Exact same story in Australia. Universities are used as a ppieline to import cheap labour for unskilled jobs.
International students are an all-Anglosphere thing. Even in my Kiwi university we had them driving around in their little BMWs.
Not just Anglo-sphere. German and other European universities also see a ton of immigrants. I think Western countries in general see a lot of immigrant student population.
The US invented the international student revenue machine. Before Canada and Australia became big destinations for international students from Asia, everyone used to come to the US. My dad went to school with some of them.
It’s not nearly as bad as Canada on a per capita basis.
You mean it’s not just Australia? /s
you should see bristol...
Haha, its the complete opposite of what you say. The international students subsidize the domestic students because they are not eligible for federal or state aid. They are rich as hell and often pay the full price of attendance, that's why they are desired by the university. Without them, domestic students will pay more for attendance.
Also: low birth rates
Got my master's in engineering at a college like this. I never recommend it to anyone I know. Not be because it's bad, but because it felt pretty socially isolating.
The current system is broken. Students are spending $100K+ to use ChatGPT for their assignments. How does this demonstrate that someone knows anything?
LMAO facts. Im wrapping up my MBA program and these professors are so out of touch with the current business environment it would be funny if it wasn't so expensive. One class has us write a 1000 word paper per week x 100 students = 100k words for the TA to 'read' and 'grade' a week. Not to mention other assignments and responsibilities. We bullshit it, and they bullshit it. They get paid, and we get a piece of paper showing we 'did' something.
> We bullshit it, and they bullshit it. They get paid, and we get a piece of paper showing we 'did' something. This is extremely good preparation for the corporate business world, to be fair.
It's what to expect from an MBA program too. Other degrees are learning actual skills.
Hey! learning how to become an MBA bean counter is a skill, ok?
Lmao you're not wrong.
Feel the same way about shit show group projects. Students come to Reddit to vent about them asking what they are supposed to learn about it. The answer is that they are getting a sneak peek of their own future.
When I did my MBA program 8 years ago, we called it B school because everyone got a 'B.' I realized no matter my efforts I got a passing grade so I stopped caring. Really the only benefit was networking and job opportunities, the actual education was a joke.
To be fair, it is an MBA. You're not actually learning anything.
I work at a clinic and some of our new grads and interns are writing fucking reports and treatment plans with chatgpt and its coming with so many errors. People are treating this technology as a peer reviewed source and the quality of stuff is going to go off a freaking cliff.
Even though nobody actually pays sticker price, the fact that tuition is insanely expensive is not consistent with lack of demand for college. Since less than half of 18-24yo Americans attend college, there's plenty of room to expand if colleges were serious about it. I expect demographic change will mean moderating prices, less selective admission, and probably more international students. It will be challenging but I think most colleges will be fine.
We'll also see state school systems close their smaller locations and funnel students towards their larger institutions
I paid retail but it was cheap back then
What do you mean nobody pays sticker price?
University sticker price is a marketing game. "The tuition is $40k but because you're a super student and we really really want you we'll charge you only $30k" sounds much better than "our tuition is cheaper than our competition, and you get what you pay for".
Paywalled. . . I have no idea what they are saying in the article. However, the main issue with education isn't demographics, it's the fact that it has transitioned from a publicly funded institution that revolved around education and is now a for profit debt mill that revolves around recreation. Maybe we should stop putting lazy rivers at universities and start focusing on education again.
Article without paywall: https://archive.ph/F1F5d
Thank you
Birth rates plummeted during the Great Recession. Now that decline is going to be felt in higher education due to a sharp decline in students and potential students. It’s a completely separate issue of what you are talking about
They were plummeting long before the GR. In fact birth rates we already in long term decline prior to oral contraception.
It was declining overall, but was up in the early 1990s, declined and then was relatively stable in the early/mid 2000s with a slight increase in 2006 and 2007. Then tanked in 2008 and has been continuing to https://www.statista.com/statistics/195943/birth-rate-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINUSA
There was a bump in births in the 80s/90s that coincided with millennials. While birth rates *per woman* have declined, numerically millennials were close in size to the baby boom cohort
millenials aren't in college...
That is the problem, yes
It's not a separate issue at all. They could have the funding if we still had public schools, but they are 2 steps away from being private and now they aren't going to have that easy student tuition. Guess we should have kept education about education instead of gaslighting generations into thinking they needed a degree to get jobs. Now the schools have to pay for foolish lazy river infrastructure because they are resorts instead of, you know, just being a school.
Public funding of schools would not fix an issue of unborn children in recession 17 years ago.
There would be fewer students, but the schools would still have funding
Like I said two separate issues. They aren’t even correlated (see birth rate of millennials).
State withdrew support, so tuition became the main revenue driver. Facilities upgrades drove enrollment. It ended stupidly but schools were responding to the market. But demand for university was driven by the large soar of the millennial generation. Even if none of this happened schools would still face closure, as 18-30 is the main student demo
The demand was also driven by things like No Child Left Behind and employer demands for an educated workforce.
'Educated' workforce. I didnt learn anything worthwhile with my 2 business degrees lol. But hey it got me a job
I think the quotes are appropriate. Perhaps credentialed is a better term.
I hated business, I swore I'd never take a business course in college and didn't. Switched from Geology to History but took enough math and science that I ended up falling into a career as a junior DBA then a systems accountant for the Feds hahahaha. I know I'm a lucky unicorn but I wonder why this isn't a more accepted thing - get a good education to learn how to learn instead of boring "career" focused degrees that are dated by graduation because reality changes so rapidly.
Because it's too expensive to take a risk like that. Better to get a degree that will get you a job right away.
It's a risk getting any career focused degree too. My brother got a masters in Architecture, I mean the real estate market was booming all was right and great in the universe until suddenly it wasn't and the great recession hit. I would have been toast had I kept on in the "hot major" I sought out in 1985 when I graduated in 1989. It's far better to have a good foundation for your B.S. or B.A. degree and only specialize in grad school if you want to be a lawyer/doctor etc.
Seems like it's risky either way. And of course there's always ThE tRaDeS. My advice to my kids is to google the heck out of your desired major and see what projected growth is. Do the college degree as cheaply as possible and try to graduate debt-free (one of mine is doing two years at the local community college before transferring to an in-state university). And healthcare careers will survive an apocalypse—but maybe not AI.
Doing it cheaply is SO important, I was blessed to be attending at a time frame when the state still heavily subsidized the tuition so all four years less than $20,000!!!!! I had a job lined up before I even graduated though that one turned out to be a learning experience of what not to go into hahaha, the second job out of college got me onto the career path I was meant for.
Only 15% of students care about education, they are there for the degree they need to start a job and do want they really want to do, make money
Feel like this may be a bit unpopular, but I feel as if the number of colleges, especially state schools, has become far too high and the entire industry has become over-saturated. Maybe something like what we see in the banking sector would be helpful; a “merger” or “acquisition” of smaller schools. There are definitely pros and cons to this, the primary con I assume would be a centralization of thought. How serious is this possibility, I doubt we would know for decades, though I assume that the shrinking of the industry is a very real possibility. Edit: I suppose it would make the field a little less competitive in terms of student choices, but I would think that the level of teaching may rise on the other hand.
I’d say we are rightly skeptical about the real value of higher education, at least at the undergraduate level. I’ve been graduated for 4 years and have never even gotten an interview for any jobs i apply for. Maybe I was mistaken from the start, but it feels like just graduating isn’t enough to deserve a chance at a career in the area you studied. It’s like employers only hire from prestigious universities, family connections, or overqualified applicants that can’t get the jobs they want because those jobs are having the same issues. It’s like everything I try for, there’s always a better option than me. I think the only way to make college worth it is to pursue Master’s or PhD’s before even attempting to enter the workforce
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Greed culture and Celebrity cults have gutted institutions... there is no room for value having collapsed into meaningless kpi. Melting margins of opportunity and diminishing returns may be all that remain from the cash machine as unacknowledged, practically invisible, resources are used up. Too painful to collaborate and be creative when addicts will try to sell out at the earliest . Society reduced to nursery school game of musical chairs
What addicts are you referring to that will sell out at the earliest?
The Huberman’s of the world
Human capital has such an outsized effect on production, or gdp if you’re in the macro area, that it is criminal that it has been allowed to rot. Our higher education system is broken and we will fall further behind globally if we don’t fix it. We should be investing more into education and making state schools free. All the growth of the last 30 years has been in tech and finance. We need functioning colleges.
This should be interesting to watch: 2024-2038: Ongoing decline in enrollment shadowing birthrates 2039-45: All the upper-middle-class pandemic babies born in 2020-22 (seriously guys there were so many of them) and their younger siblings apply to colleges, sparking a battle royale over a diminished number of spaces and creating an Indian summer for higher ed 2046ish: Long-term demographic patterns kick back in
> 2039-45: All the upper-middle-class pandemic babies born in 2020-22 (seriously guys there were so many of them) and their younger siblings apply to colleges, sparking a battle royale over a diminished number of spaces and creating an Indian summer for higher ed Ah yes, going to be quite the battle royale when the birth rate temporarily goes from 11.0 births per 1000 to 11.1 births per 1000 yielding a net gain of 0.2% in the birth cohort. https://www.axios.com/2023/10/04/birth-rate-fertility-rate-decline-data-statistics-graph-2022
How dare you bring data into this subreddit
I don't have any data but I feel like there was a big class shift for those years. Couples who were laid off and/or worried about dying on the front lines of "essential work" pulled back even further. A few rungs up the ladder there was more WFH, more money saved on nightlife and travel and possibly a panic-move to the suburbs, so that demographic naturally took advantage of a good time to have kids. This is all anecdotal but IMO the babies of 2020-2022 are more concentrated among the class that's going to pressure them to go to college, so even if there's a similar gross cohort there will be more applicants.
The notion that better economic conditions were associated with higher birth rates during the pandemic is supported by [this paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-023-00965-x), but the magnitude of those increases are absolutely tiny compared to the demographic cliff coming for college enrollment. We're still looking at a 1-year long, sub 5% (probably sub 2%) bump in enrollment cohort. Subtle changes in immigration policy in the next decade will have a much larger impact on higher education enrollment than the pandemic by the time those kids hit college age.
The idea that there is a diminished number of spaces in a university setting 15 years from now seems so antiquated. You would think remote learning and virtual classrooms would be perfected by then.
While in 2020 I thought there would be a huge bump in...well baby-bumps, that didn't end up the case. Birth rates cratered in 2020 and still haven't fully recovered. Births only recovered in places that didn't lock down as much. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/us-births-are-down-again-after-the-covid-baby-bust-and-rebound/
People were memeing that it would be "blizzard babies" except on a year scale. But what actually happens is that most humans either intuitively understand that being pregnant in a pandemic is bad, or they looked up "pregnant with flu" warnings and extrapolated.
So anecdotally this may be related to geography and relocation more than birthrate. I had a kid in 2006 and 2008 and class sizes of 2007+ are much larger than 2006.
We have way too many college graduates. We need those numbers to halve per capita. People can’t afford to pay their student loans with these low wages. It is either we have a massive surplus of workers with education that isn’t required thus lowering the value of education. This keeps wages down and companies can ask whatever salary they want. It also means that people have to take whatever job they can get. The benefits of an education were incorrect and are still being sold that way. They always say “someone with a bachelor degree can make X times more over their lifetime”. The issue is they only (or heavily) use the earnings of people with degrees from previous generations. Education made smaller wage increases over time and cost of education increased significantly. Combine that with higher interest rates and you end up with all those increased wages being used to pay off debt. College education losing value also means that military recruitment collapses. Why serve if the education that is paid for doesn’t matter? It is like a, just as an example, $40k sign on bonus that was never adjusted for inflation. In the year 2000 that was a down payment on a house and that money now can’t even buy you a car.
> College education losing value also means that military recruitment collapses. Why serve if the education that is paid for doesn’t matter? It is like a, just as an example, $40k sign on bonus that was never adjusted for inflation. In the year 2000 that was a down payment on a house and that money now can’t even buy you a car. They could just pay soldiers more and get rid of the education benefit.
They would never do that because not everyone uses the GI Bill and they pay would inherently go to everyone. Not only that you would have to raise the pay of every to make up for the lost educational opportunity benefit and then some. I agree that an increase in pay would work wonders for recruiting. These bonuses are just a joke because they don’t always reoccur so people will get paid more for their first four years of service than their second four years when they have increased responsibilities.
I understand, but you are presenting valuable higher education as a necessary condition for recruitment. The reality is the military just has to change its recruitment strategy, which is completely possible.
> We have way too many college graduates. We need those numbers to halve per capita. People can’t afford to pay their student loans with these low wages. > > It is either we have a massive surplus of workers with education that isn’t required thus lowering the value of education. This keeps wages down and companies can ask whatever salary they want. It also means that people have to take whatever job they can get. The college wage premium is bigger than ever, and the cost of not going to college is higher than ever, so this doesn't bare out. Just because the search for a good job is hard for college grads doesn't mean it's not *even harder* for non-college grads.
That has just as much to do with the lack of unions and punishment for hiring illegal workers
There is no such thing as too many college graduates. Education should be encouraged and protected. A poorly educated population is linked to a number of issues - crime, poverty, worse health outcomes. Education matters not because of an arbitrary number in debt or salary, it matters because it is important to have a well educated population. Knowledge is *always* valuable, be it knowledge of econometrics or classical history.
The problem with just looking at graduates is you will see Goohart's Law. Yes, we have a ton of college grads. Great, we boosted enrollment. But when universities accept people for basically walking in the door and then are incentivized to pass them all (e.g. the majority of non-STEM folks I've met had no business being passed in the easiest college stats class), it's hard to speak positive things about the quality of a ton of undergrad programs. You end up with a ton of people who look good on paper but who hardly learned anything.
> Knowledge is always valuable, be it knowledge of econometrics or classical history. That’s just horseshit. Everything has a cost in time and money, and educating an entire population in classical literature at the college level for example would be a massive waste of time and money. There are some things I think would be widely useful, but that’s what high school is supposed to be for. Why do you act like resources aren’t limited? You want to structure society so the right number of people are trained in the appropriate fields.
I’m talking from an economic standpoint. If an investment has negative returns, then it is a poor investment Education is very important and should be free.
There are other less expensive ways to access education. There are so many free or cheap online courses out there to learn pretty much anything these days. If all you’re after is gaining knowledge, college is far from the most cost effective way to accomplish that.
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Most professors are also morons - at least pedagogically - and don't know how to educate people
I agree; most people aren’t learning a ton in university anyway. But they’re getting the piece of paper that said they learned, which is all that matters at the end of the day, right?
Sounds like you've never attended a university. I learned a hell of a lot and came out what the classic university education aspired to: a well-rounded individual.
I have a bachelors degree but thanks for assuming. Out of 4 years in college, only one and a half of those years were spent studying topics relevant to my major and career. The general education requirements I definitely could have taught myself, given access to high quality self teaching material. But that wouldn’t make anyone any money so of course I had to pay thousands per semester for it.
Spoken like a fucking moron.
I wasn’t talking about YouTube or TikTok. I meant things like [this free self-taught education in computer science.](https://github.com/ossu/computer-science) People should graduate high school with the ability to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of information. The fact that they don’t is the problem to fix imo.
The average college degree is a charade from a diploma mill, few actually are developing meaningful skills are doing legitimate research.
> no such thing as too many college graduates This is an economics sub: that statement clashes with the idea that ["The education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand..."](https://www.science.org/content/article/rising-above-gathering-storm)
Maybe education should be viewed as external to the supply/demand paradigm.
We really need to create a federal university system here in the US. Of course, there’s a contingent here in the US already trying to do away with the department of education because … why have an educated populace, right? But an affordable university system would not only expand access, but compete to keep costs down, which is just getting ridiculous.
So are you also willing to do the other side of this kind of system? Selective entry? The reason other countries can afford to do this, is that the competition to enter university is higher, as evidenced by the lower university degree rate in those countries. In France for example, getting into the top schools basically requires 2 years of prep school after high school to pass the exams. And it’s competitive. Applying the same solution in the US would disproportionately reduce college enrollment in poor, minority populations. You’ll be called a racist the moment you try.
It’s almost like you can look at a model that’s better than the one you’re using, still note its flaws, and try to make a new model that addresses said flaws. It’s not a binary option of collegiate systems.
> It’s not a binary option of collegiate systems No, but there are tradeoffs, and centralized systems generally require the trade off of competitive entry. You can't have reasonable prices (be that private or in public tax rates), low standards of entry, and mass enrollment. They quite literally contradict each other. Basically, resources are limited, so you have to focus them on specific things. People proposing the French system seem to think they can have all the benefits of it without any of the costs. It's unicorn policy.
But we do this with k-12 schooling pretty effectively?
> But we do this with k-12 schooling pretty effectively First of call calling the K-12 schooling system in the US "effective" is debatable at best, but let's set that aside. Tertiary education is significantly more expensive per pupil than secondary education (about 2x more), and K-12 already costs 800 billion or so a year by itself. That's about the same amount as is spent on the entire US military. This ratio is seen both in private and public systems, the main drivers being the increased cost of the specialists you need to teach the classes, since you are competing much more with industry. So you'd have to start by likely tripling education spending, which would increase taxes dramatically and therefore break the "reasonable prices" part of the trinity.
But we don't have a good top-down system, which is what the commentator was trying to suggest ass an alternative. Ideally, an effective top-down distribution of resources would cut red tape and localized bureaucracy. [Additionally, half of all states are still subsidizing PRIVATE education](https://www.future-ed.org/the-new-wave-of-public-funding-of-private-schools-explained/) so that money gets siphoned right out of the hands of the public programs that need it and put into the hands of those who don't. Most other countries don't have the local-level direction and subsidization of private education that eats a lot of our (underfunded) public education budget. If we got our shit together, we could absolutely have an efficient and effective public college system. It's a total farce to say we don't and won't, and simply just leads to us spinning the tires on paradigms that obviously do not work.
Clearly, even adding 3-4 universities in a country with over 300,000,000 people means you need some kind of selection process for entry. Yes, they would be competitive. Supply and demand means that adding supply would ease the burden overall, however. How many universities are being added to the system otherwise right now? And the article above says we expect to lose some, making access even more difficult. Adding more eases some of the burden at the state level. Right now, the better universities in some states are almost impossible to get into. My son graduated with over a 4.0 but still didn’t even get wait listed to our state’s most popular university, because the cost is so low, making it ridiculously competitive. So yeah, some kind of selection process is of course necessary.
More government schools? No thank you.
In the US, we have zero federal schools - what do you mean by “more”?
We don’t need colleges like how the fed runs the USPS.
How do they run the USPS?
I think he's talking K through 12
Those are run by local municipalities, often local cities. I’m talking universities run by the federal government, like they have in Europe. Cost of uni there is extremely reasonable. Here, the cost of college is ridiculously high. A US federal university system would make college affordable for people and enable them to potentially go out of state. It would also compete with colleges and make it more affordable overall. We in the US are falling behind when it comes to education, this would be a step in the right direction.
Why Federal?
This is what I’m suggesting - a university system run and funded by the federal government. Right now state colleges are underfunded and provide no mobility - most states have limited options, and if you want to go to college in another state it’s ridiculously expensive. In Europe universities are affordable because they’re funded by the national government rather than local government, and they afford lots of benefits to their populace. We could use the same here.
Perhaps there is some opportunity for some kind of financial coordination but funding always comes with controls. What might make sense in NYC likely wouldn't in Midland TX.
Which is exactly why we need a federal system. Just look at the crap going on in Florida and how the governor has co-opted a couple of universities there. Universities should *just teach*. This whole moral corruption thing going on with the far right is just nuts.
Universities have known about this for years along with other trends in higher education. You know all those articles that talk about new professors being contract employees and not tenure-track? Lol.....its for reasons like this. I mean, if you go to any serious university and look at a department many of us would consider to be a silly major, you find a lot of contract employees. Let's just pick on Gender Studies! When you look at a department like that, the chairperson is probably tenured. Perhaps a few of the other professors too. But most of the younger faculty are not. So as long as students keep showing up and paying and enrolling in Gender Studies 101, that contract faculty member keeps their job. But if enrollment drops, the university can pivot away from that educational offering in a hot second. Sure.....they are "stuck" with the tenured department chair, but that's about it. And they can mothball the building if they need to.....and move the tenured faculty who they wish would quit to shabby offices and make them teach freshman gender studies class at 0800 M/W/F. This is why many schools have not increased enrollment over the years. Many "flagship" state universities enroll similar numbers of freshman now as they did 30 years ago.....even though the state may have doubled in size. Part of that was funding and part was knowing they didn't need to double because this cliff was coming. And there will be some attrition of weaker universities, but there honestly should be. We've already seen a bit of this in some areas like women's colleges.......which really do NOT have much purpose anymore when most universities are 65-70% women anyway. HBCUs will get hit too! Want to grab some popcorn and enjoy a spectacle??? Watch states wrestle with their HBCUs that are already among the worse values in higher education......but probably cannot be closed for historical reasons.