Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

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Colleges should be shaking in their boots for the next generation, because there's going to be a whole generation of parents that suffered terrible college debt they couldn't pay off and will likely be telling their children it's just not worth it (as opposed to the previous generation that had cheap college and a great economy and pressured all their children to go for that 'guaranteed better life').

I made it through relatively okay because STEM and some scholarships, but I'm not even sure I'll recommend my children go to college. Especially with online courses (not talking about college, just courses) becoming more viable and useful.

I definitely won't for some pursuits, like art. I'd rather they live at home with me for four years, doing self-study and putting their art out there online and developing a following rather than spend $200,000+ on college that will likely not result in anything afterwards (hell, as a semi-professional game designer myself, I'd happily work with them to get their art into published games).

Also a generation of potential parents who won't be having kids because they can't afford to, largely because of student loan and housing costs.

That's already hitting - the incoming class of 2023 (matriculating 2019) is the first cohort born since 9/11, and is tiny. A number of colleges are facing bankruptcy because there just aren't enough students to go around. And it'll only get worse. Birth rates were depressed from 2001-2009, but they fell off a cliff after 2009.

Colleges were counting on foreign students to fill the gap. Now with massive unemployment, immigration may slow to a trickle for a while, and with it the allure of American colleges for students elsewhere.

At full tuition, one foreign student could bring as much revenue as 3 or more domestic students. There's a much larger population of students outside the U.S. than in it, too.

People aren't stupid. They do respond to incentives and disincentives.

The debt load on young people is greater than the cost of raising a child to adulthood. By the time it is paid off, the urge to procreate has gone.

And those who turned baby-raisin' into a soulless, for-profit industry can choke on their sins, too.

I didn't mention that, but you're right. I also have been putting off having children (and the pandemic didn't help that at all) until my finances are in better shape, and I'm sure there are a lot of people in worse positions than I am.

Can I read more about these statistics somewhere?

Big WaPo feature story on Hampshire's bankruptcy and the impending demographic apocalypse for colleges:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2019/10/21/downfall-...

Fertility rates by year in U.S:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

Births per year:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-...

I was wrong about the start date, BTW. I'd thought that fertility started dropping after 9/11 (which also roughly coincides with the children of the 70s having kids instead of baby boomers, a smaller cohort), but it really didn't peak until 2007-2008. Then there's a double-whammy: there are fewer women of childbearing age (coinciding with Gen-Xers born in the 70s and early Millenials), and the fertility rate among women who are of childbearing age has fallen off a cliff. Births are down about 15% since 2007; when you think about what that means for a typical classroom (where you might've had 24 kids, now you might have 20), that's pretty huge.

Looking at the first chart tells me that the size of the upcoming cohort will be similar to Gen X -- that is it will be smaller than the previous but not unsustainably small.

Although that chart doesn't capture the ratio of women of fertile age in each year, so there may be an unforeseen cliff.

Might be similar to Gen X, but remember that college seats have expanded to peak throughput.

Birth rates where? Just the US? Or globally or just Western powerhouse counties?

Side note: I remember being shocked the first time I found out that baby boomers and ‘the aging population issue’ weren’t actually global issues and only affected the counties who took the spoils post WW2 (aka western powerhouse countries).

Lots of other counties have very different population ages mixes for example Ireland and Turkey.

Developed countries, but it's spreading worldwide. Japan hit their baby bust in the 90s, and then Western Europe in the last 10 years, and now it applies to the U.S. as a whole. China and India have also seen remarkable drops since 1980.

The only continent that still has fertility rates above replacement is Africa:

https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...

Wow those are really good points I hadn't heard yet about future outlook for colleges.

There's a lot of parents whom children are in high school now that already went through the student loan debt cycle so we should start seeing the effects of that soon.

Perhaps we'll see a rise in trade/vocational school as a result.

I think the stigma of not going to college is changing a lot (for the better) or at least in the programming world it seems that way.

My career has been helped tremendously with the contacts I got in college (read: friends, classmates, professors). Some value in that.

I suppose going the private route would just result in different contacts. I also benefit from colleagues from previous employment.

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