"Peak College" has passed. The first and second tier colleges will still do fine but many of the third tier colleges are doomed. They'll have to reinvent themselves as trade schools or corporate training centers or something if they want to survive. The job market for tenure track professors will get even tougher.
It’ll be impossible to replicate the college experience without some kind of shared stressor like classes and exams. It’s the same deal in military training where collective suffering is used to instill a sense of camaraderie amongst recruits from various places and backgrounds.
I never felt that, we spent a lot more time partying than stressing about exams.
I have not really made lifetime friends there either but I'm not a team player. If I were in the military everyone would hate me (like they did when I was forced to play team sports at school).
We really need to have alternate institutions that perform the same social function. It's too bad secret societies with mystic rites don't really exist anymore.
This probably depends on what you mean by college experience. I think I was to fucked up the whole time to be stressed by classes. Until I got kicked out.
I recently moved to a rural home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
I socialize with a bunch of current and former college professors, and they've all remarked on this phenomenon for nearby UVA and Virginia Tech. Interestingly, the one university in the area that is not impacted is the Christian fundamentalist Liberty University. The demographic that attends that school come from a high birth rate subculture. BYU is also not having an issue.
In fact, Liberty has had to expand. I'm not a fan of religious education, but I also think that ALL university tuitions are vastly overpriced to fund the absurdly overpaid and bloated armies of administrators. This includes my alma mater Virginia Tech.
Honestly I would love to go back to college for studying $THING. And then I think about the kids there and decide I'd rather stay away. That and the stupid shit schools do to make sure you aren't using AI.
No thanks, I'd rather watch lectures on YouTube and go to the library. I don't need any diploma, I only want enrichment.
I've been following a conman fantisist for a number of years and of late he's gone full LLM powered and has been churning out graduate degrees from respectable sounding places. Years ago he merely claimed to have varrious degrees, but now with the help of chatgpt he's just pumping them out.
While I'm sure a few places care many very clearly don't.
It is crazy to see how much the birth rates dropped after the recession and how that is finally hurting colleges. I guess a lot of the smaller schools will just have to close if they cannot find enough students to enroll.
Technically, the number of high school graduates dropping wouldn’t have affected colleges yet if enrollment rates kept going up, but they have also declined (only a couple percent for now, but I bet that trend continues).
Also, seeing only 40% of high school graduates going to college is a wake up call to how much I don’t interact with people outside my bubble, because I don’t know anyone whose kids didn’t go to college in the last 20 years.
Surprised because I learned today UT Austin had so many applications(100K) that they can only issue 25% admissions and had to put off the rest 75% for one extra month. It made me feel college is still "crowded" to me.
"Good" universities (ie. public and private programs with either regional or national prestige) remain in demand. The issue is there are hundreds of no-name private and public programs that are becoming strapped of students.
It's hard to make a case to attend Western Illinois University or St Mary's College versus going to community college and transferring to your state flagship (eg. Grangier Guarantee [0] and TAG [1] respectively) or an Ivy or Ivy Tier (eg. NYU's CCTOP [2])
I also have no idea how you can legitimately claim to predict the birth rate. There is a trend to be sure but it's driven by several factors so this "heartwrenching" prognostication is ridiculous.
Meanwhile consider the value of a degree over the past 30 years. Colleges got sloppy and relied on the largess of the student loan program and not any genuine forward looking management, the degrees became lower quality, and the value to a graduate plummeted. Plus the Internet exists and has wide penetration throughout the US.
This is lame misguided fear mongering apologia. On brand for Bloomberg.
What source? The US birth rate was absolutely not steady from 1990 to 2010 according to the OECD [0]. Fear mongering aside, surely the prospect of a population failing to birth enough new lives to replace the ones that die, as happened in France last year, seems like a bad thing for a capitalist system that depends on growth uber alles. AI and efficiency be damned, fewer people buy fewer things.
reply