Freshman enrollment is down at US colleges — and after the past few years, it’s no wonder
Gee why do you suppose this is occurring? The creative writing storyteller who wrote the above blames :
- the pandemic
- FAFSA financial aid system
- tuition costs
- Fewer white people attending college
- Men: “…given that women already outnumber men in college by a 3 to 2 ratio, it means that the male revolt against higher education is accelerating. “
But there is another very important reason that was omitted – see if you can spot what the other reason might be:
This is also leading to the closure of many college majors – because there are not enough students: ‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ choices shrink as colleges slash majors
It is not just a “rural students” issue. They blame a decline in funding, the pandemic – and literally everything except the demographic collapse and decline in the number of students. This quote made me laugh as activists protested the closures – “The university points out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.”
An entire “news” story about closing college majors – and not a single mention of the demographic collapse and the actual decline in the number of students.
And we are only getting started – we will need fewer public schools and public-school teachers and staff as school districts across the nation are closing and merging schools. Further ahead is the challenging labor shortage issue – which we already see with today’s low unemployment. For prior generations, 5% unemployment was considered an optimal economy.
This chart shows the December unemployment rate since 1929 – for 2024, this shows the 4.1% October unemployment rate. We are now in a period where labor will rule the marketplace as the post WW2 baby boom and echo booms have ended – labor is no longer in surplus.
Since the 1960s, the unemployment rate was almost always above 5% and often in the 6-8% range. We are now in a new era of low unemployment that is likely to be long lasting (but depends on whether the U.S. opens the immigration spigot to import workers).
If not for the Covid pandemic restrictions that closed businesses and increased unemployment, the unemployment rate has been trending down since the peak in 2009. Coincidentally, 2008 was the peak year for high school grads in the U.S. – that peak being the peak of the “baby boom echo”.
