Here is a very informative recent article on the hard-cold reality of the state the higher education is in dubbed as the "enrollment cliff." Some smaller private colleges have announced plans to close.
An obvious policy fix is to bring in the student of color demographic that has been historically under-represented in higher education. This should get coupled with addressing student debt policies and financial aid support for prospective students. This would encourage many students to enroll. Online degrees are also structuring students from brick and mortar schools. Eliminating barriers to legal immigration would help, too, including creating a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients.
We'll be hearing in higher education circles about both the enrollment cliff and "deconstruction." The latter, as defined by Shippensburg University President Charles Patterson, is as follows:
“Presidents these days are in the business of deconstruction,” he said — not in the sense of tearing down what their forebears created, but of rethinking and reconfiguring what universities have and who they are, for leaner times."
There are, of course, regional differences with Northeastern and Midwestern colleges particularly impacted in the more immediate future. All told, the future of higher education is concerning such that expressions of local- and state-level political support by our communities must get underscored in our state legislatures nationwide.
-Angela Valenzuela
#EnrollmentCliff #highered #highereducation #deconstruction
The incredible shrinking future of college
The population of college-age Americans is about to crash. It will change higher education forever.
Ship was in fine form. Young men and women wearing logoed Champion sweatshirts bustled between buildings. There was a line at the coffee shop in the student union. It was the kind of bright-blue autumn day that you would see on a brochure.
There was no way to tell, from the outside, that Ship was a shrinking institution. Or that the problem is about to get a lot worse — not just here, but at colleges and universities nationwide.
In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”
Among the small number of elite colleges and research universities — think the Princetons and the Penn States — the cliff will be no big deal. These institutions have their pick of applicants and can easily keep classes full.
For everyone else, the consequences could be dire. In some places, the crisis has already begun. College enrollment began slowly receding after the millennial enrollment wave peaked in 2010, particularly in regions that were already experiencing below-average birth rates while simultaneously losing population to out-migration. Starved of students and the tuition revenue they bring, small private colleges in New England have begun to blink off the map. Regional public universities like Ship are enduring painful layoffs and consolidation.
The timing is terrible. Trade policy, de-unionization, corporate consolidation, and substance abuse have already ravaged countless communities, particularly in the post-industrial Northeast and Midwest. In many cases, colleges have been one of the only places that provide good jobs in their communities, offer educational opportunities for locals, and have strong enough roots to stay planted. The enrollment cliff means they might soon dry up and blow away.
