California State University system sees unprecedented decline in enrollment | Hacker News Reader

California State University system sees unprecedented decline in enrollment

msn.com

47 pointslxm74 comments

Current CSU Lecturer here, working for one of our largest campuses. Since I started 10 years ago, my department (CS) has seen more than double the amount of enrollment. Projections for us are to double again in the next 4 years or so.

The decline in student population might be a thing system-wide, but not for certain areas like STEM.

Edit: Also, we have lost quite a few faculty due to our poor pay, which makes our overall class sizes huge. When I started, class size was capped at 35. Now I have two lecture-hall size classes at ~100 students per class.

> The decline in student population might be a thing system-wide, but not for certain areas like STEM

I remember applying to UCs and CSUs for CS/CE barely 10-15 years ago and it looks like the amount of seats available and faculty in Engineering has remained consistent despite the massive growth in popularity of Engineering majors system wide.

Hopefully it doesn't tip over and collapse due to underfunding, but having seen the state of facilities at Cal recently, it doesn't seem to be going the right way.

CS enrollment spiked like crazy in general though, not sure if anything about university system health could be gleaned from that.

fun fact for the older HN community: The CSU system has a distance learning system (esp. SJSU), if you're interested in learning something new for fun - it's a great resource. I've used it over the last couple of years and am contemplating getting a masters from here as well.

Are CSUs academic powerhouses? No. Are they still great for learning upper division physics, chemistry, and math at an affordable price? Absolutely.

Another fun fact, having worked for CSU extended education. The extended education department is entirely self-funded (which is why credits cost more), and receives grants from the state. Thus, they are the only department in the school that has money. Guess who the best teachers want to work for...

It is like a little private school, within the system.

The covid kids are graduating high school. Imagine the effect quarantine had on the lives of these kids; the distrust. The disparity of the quality of education between socioeconomic strata during that time. Maybe an indicator of mass ennui, accelerated by the lack of affordability here.

> According to the Education Data Initiative, college enrollment statistics indicate that more Americans are forgoing higher education; “some may be putting off college attendance to build savings.”

Less demand should reduce the price to attend, right?

Depends on whether or not there are economies of scale.

I'm not sure they will lower prices.

For selective colleges I think the impact will be negligible. They already reject a sizeable fraction of applicants so it would be less painful for them to respond to a shrinking applicant pool by rejecting a slightly smaller fraction of that pool.

And many of the rest may not be able to afford to lower the price due to administrative bloat:

"For example three universities, the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, and the University of California at San Diego actually have more non-faculty employees on campus than students."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...

For many colleges it would be substantially less painful to slowly go bankrupt than to attempt to fire half of the staff. Perhaps new lower-priced entrants will emerge from the wreckage, but I don't think most existing schools can afford to lower their prices at this point.

Caltech has a lot of research staff as permanent or long term employees and a small student body

There is little/no price pressure on universities.

* Many/most loads are backed by the government.

* Government doesn't put any restrictions on the amount of the loan.

* Colleges are paid regardless if a student is unable to pay a load.

There is little price pressure on colleges right now. Maybe students are finally figuring out being burdened with a lot of debt is bad, but it's more of an indirect signal to colleges. Colleges only will feel pain if students start going straight into industry or trade schools.

Ideally, the government should get out of backing student loans. That would make underwriters actually look at the chance that a given person would be able to pay-back said loan with a given degree. This would help apply some price pressures. As well, if colleges could somehow take a partial financial hit if students weren't able to pay back a loan, maybe that would help as well.

Is this really surprising?

Let's just look at US demographics right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

Looking at the chart, I'd expect to have seen a drop in enrollments among those younger than early to mid 20's over the last few years. 6% easily seems en par with the demographics shift.

If that reasoning is correct, we'll see a slight recovery or stabilization peaking in about 5 years or so and then steady declines until who knows when.

Colleges all over the nation will be competing for students for the at least the next 2 decades.

Prices will drop, and offerings will probably be more tailored to offer better value, and that may improve/stabilize enrollment rates somewhat, but the overall trend will be down.

I work at a large state university in the US, and none of this is a surprise. It is in part general population trends, in part a significant drop in birthrates around the 2008 recession. COVID didn't help -- the number of foreign students paying out-of-state tuition (which subsidizes everyone else to some extent) also dropped. These trends do not hit all universities and colleges evenly however.

Population pyramid is the new population density meme.

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Now I know the strategy for our next board meeting…

When I taught in the Cal State system, almost 1/3 of my CS class were professionals looking to upgrade their situation.

I wonder if that group has swung some of the stats.

Joe Biden basically spearheaded the US ability to turn student lending into a perpetual organ grinder of human misery in 1976. Did US colleges think people wouldn't wise up to the nightmare of un-dischargeable debt and the explosion of papermill colleges from Section 439 after fifty years?

https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-made-it-harder-to-disc...

it will likely take another fifty years to rebuild the confidence of parents (millennials who experienced this predatory lending firsthand) as well as kids (who watched their parents struggle under predatory lending) to re-enter higher education and this couldnt come at a more inconvenient time as China is set to eclipse the US as a superpower.

More likely the system will collapse into socialism. Biden/dems pack US with migrants for a reason, exactly this.

I know when my daughter started college 5 years ago, the dean was up front that there was a demographic cliff coming up, I wonder how much of the decline is that.

what's a "demographic cliff"?

A sudden lack of population at certain ages.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...

Take a look at the 20-24 and 15-19 age groups. Note that 15-19 is smaller, and consider that members of that age group will move up to the next group over the next 5 years. They're also entering typical college age. Now, in this chart, it's far from a "cliff", but it is smaller, so that would mean that you could reasonably expect a lower enrollment since that age bracket is smaller than those that came before it.

Note that chart is from 2015, here is a more recent one[1]. There is no drop in current college age students, in fact the birth rate saw slight growth in the decade leading up to today's 18 year olds. There has since been a significant decrease in birth rate, but it shouldn't have affected college enrollment yet.

Edit: Enginerrrd posted data[2] with more fidelity than the 5-year bins both of our charts were using, and it indeed shows a cliff for this year.

[1]https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/20...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39682145

That's US wide. Consider the population pyramid for California only https://data.census.gov/profile/California?g=040XX00US06 and the buckets for 15-19, 10-14, and 5-9 and consider what that will look like for college enrollment in 5 and 10 years.

Slowing birth-rates mean fewer kids means fewer prospective college students.

Suspect this and a tight labor market are the two driving factors.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23428166/college-enrollmen... ("Vox: The incredible shrinking future of college")

The number of people who are in the traditional college age bracket is falling as a result of variations in the birthrate and immigration rate.

Some schools are more effected by these demographic issues than others. Institutions that are focused on educating lots of people economically, like CSU, can be expected to feel the demographic swings far more than places like Stanford or Berkeley which are over-subscribed and are likely to remain so.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/... (also linked in sibling)

Presumably, the school was built / staffed for a certain regular enrollment that reflected some percentage of the people in state.

For California specifically:

https://data.census.gov/profile/California?g=040XX00US06

You can see the peak of 25-30 somethings, and then it drops off.

When you start looking out at the 15-19s there are 400,000 fewer than the 25-29s (roughly 3M -> 2.6M). That then means that enrollment is going to drop and things will need to be cut.

The school that I went to for grade school was built for baby boomers. It was large, and the next town over likewise had a large school. When I went it was a bit empty, not too bad though. It picked up again with the echo.

The towns have recently closed half of each school and combined classes because there isn't enough students to keep two sets of classes running at reasonable funding levels (having a class of five 3rd graders and six 4th graders is great for student to teacher ratios ... not so much the budget of a small rural school).

Structural demographics are likely a component, but also potential students evaluating the cost based on evidence of value.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/college-degree-jobs-un... | https://archive.today/oyc5e ("WSJ: Half of College Grads Are Working Jobs That Don’t Use Their Degrees")

> That is the key finding of a new study tracking the career paths of more than 10 million people who entered the job market over the past decade. It suggests that the number of graduates in jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials—52%—is greater than previously thought, and underscores the lasting importance of that first job after graduation.

Imagine how much effort and fiat was incinerated in aggregate for folks to obtain schooling and a credential that is effectively worthless.

I drilled into some of the links in that article, but nowhere did I find a definition of "underemployed" in this context. Is there a standard definition? Or did I just miss the definition in the article?

"Jobs that don't require a degree" is a very squishy definition, if that's what was used. Technically, software development doesn't require a degree - I work with several excellent developers who lack credentials.

Even a decade ago I heard Jr Linux Admins -- 20 year olds -- who dropped out of college talking about how the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

Like, they live around Northern VA, get a job working in a data center, snag a couple of certs, and then run with it. Maybe get an Associate's at the NVCC or via online orgs like U-MD.

Having done hiring in that demographic there was definitely a difference in the Jr Admin population who had real 4-year brick-and-mortar school degrees vs. those without, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that trend decreasing.

My son roughly falls in the "dropped out, career in IT" category, but I doubt he'd ever claim the juice (college) wasn't worth the squeeze. He just wasn't ready for higher ed at age 18. He did eventually complete a stack of certs and an AAS but he'd be the first to admit he shouldn't have stuck it out.

A few things, based on his experience... it took time to get into IT - instead of going to college, he was working low-wage PT jobs. The starting salary was low. It's not like he just dropped out and fell into a six-figure career (which might have been possible 20 years ago, when IT-savvy early career folks weren't as common).

> there was a demographic cliff coming up

Then ALL universities would see a drop in enrollment, except the ones at the very top of desirability list? Otherwise it could be attributed to other things like high cost of living or more useless degrees available in the university system.

Can someone explain why they didn't simply admit more international students to avoid this problem? Not to say that this is a good solution, but it's what I would expect the people who run universities to do.

That can cause problems of its own. See Canada for example:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/intl-student-program-1.709599...

The article is pretty light on facts. I wish there was some real analysis here. There's no shame in going to CSU traditionally; lots of great schools in the system and certainly fine alumni.

>There's no shame in going to CSU traditionally; lots of great schools in the system and certainly fine alumni.

Nonsense. Everyone knows that CSU grads are viewed as strictly second tier to UC grads in this industry, even though CSU standards are higher than just about any other state university. It's the most pathetic and meaningless form of credentialism I've ever seen, but don't pretend like it isn't the case. Even Merced is seen as above Cal Poly.

You think the avg CSU student is going to perform the same as avg UC student?

> You think the avg CSU student is going to perform the same as avg UC student?

Thanks for proving the point.

what point?

That there's a massive bias against CSU grads in this industry, even compared to other state schools.

Personally, I feel your average student is likely to perform quite poorly for the first couple years at a real job regardless of the institution they attended.

It is all about the individuals!

I've worked with so many people who grew up poor or had other disadvantages, went to community college or their local city or state school, and then turned into fabulously productive and insightful people.

Conversely, I've worked with so many people who graduated from elite institutions who have not turned out so well.

I'm the first to admit that the elite institutions generate a higher hit rate, but not nearly high enough for me to discount people coming out of lesser schools.

One of the smartest (and richest!) guys I know graduated from San Jose State.

City College of New York has graduated more Nobel Prize winners than any other institution in the world!

Could the more selective intake account for most of the higher hit rate? I have a hard time believing either education is actually better, except a fancier school helps build a network faster and increase chances of being sponsored/hired by alumni.

> Even Merced is seen as above Cal Poly.

Seen by who, exactly?

See how many of the lists below UC Merced appears in, how many Cal Poly SLO appears in:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-colleges-high-paying-jobs-t...

https://gizmodo.com/artificial-intelligence-college-program-...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/still-want-job-tech-top-12000...

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/best-schools-...

https://qz.com/967985/silicon-valley-companies-like-apple-aa...

https://www.businessinsider.com/top-colleges-for-working-in-...

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/20-schools-most-grads-apple-153...

https://www.businessinsider.com/schools-with-the-most-alumni...

>See how many of the lists below UC Merced appears in, how many Cal Poly SLO appears in:

This is about feelings and bias, not facts. Of course Cal Poly is a top notch school. But do you think the hiring manager isn't going to pick the identical applicant who went to Riverside instead?

> But do you think the hiring manager isn't going to pick the identical applicant who went to Riverside instead

Yes. The SLO grad will always get the leg up Dallas westwards.

Cal Poly SLO is one of the oldest universities in California (older than UCLA and CalTech) and the Western US and has a massive alumni network (C-Suite at Apple, Raytheon, Yahoo, etc back in the day as well as most of the Central California Republican Congressional contingent).

UCR and UCM are both amazing schools, but are brand new and don't have as strong an alumni network yet.

>Yes. The SLO grad will always get the leg up Dallas westwards.

Completely fair, this is indeed a California/SV problem in particular.

Outside California as well (nor is this a problem).

SLO has a strong alumni network across the West, as all western state residents pay in-state residency at state universities.

CSU contains the very highly regarded Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. As with other networks of schools there are more desirable and less desirable ones, but yeah, it's IMHO pretty close to a U of [STATE] in quality.

SJSU and SDSU engineering as well.

Cal Poly SLO, SJSU Engineering, and SDSU Engineering have similar admission statistics to upper mid tier UCs like UCI and UCSB.

I'm still a bit salty that I got into an Ivy Tier but got rejected from UCD and SLO.

SLO and SJSU are honestly amazing programs and along with UTD, UW Bothell, and UIC should be a model for high quality affordable education.

Good friend's kid got into Stanford, but not UCLA. Mom and dad are both UCLA PhDs. Dad got a real kick out of that and got a good few months of ribbing the kid - "haha, you're not smart enough for UCLA!"

[Stanford is not UC or CSU, just located in CA]

Probably a better link but PDF https://collegecampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2023_...

That's a MUCH better link. The data in it makes clear what we are seeing is a flight to quality.

The top ranked, best known Cal State schools saw enrollment grow. The lesser known and lower ranked Cal State schools saw enrollment fall. There are more lesser known Cal State schools than top ranked Cal State schools, so on average the system saw a decline.

The California Community College system (lower ranked than Cal State) saw enrollment fall more than the lower ranked Cal State Schools, and the University of California system (higher ranked than Cal State) saw enrollment grow more than the upper ranked Cal State schools.

Text-only, no Javascript:

    x=BB1jJy2i
    tnftp -4o'|grep -Eo "\"body\":\".+\"readTimeMin\""' https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/$x \
    |(echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";sed 's/\"body\":\"//;s/\\//g;s/\",\"readTimeMin\"//') > 1.htm
    firefox ./1.htm

Some of these schools didn’t have enough housing. It’s not surprising that students don’t want to sleep in cars anymore.

I mean, this explanation seems valid - more of a symptom of a poor/uncertain economy:

The link goes to a page where you were asked to download an app to read the rest of the story

I could read the whole story and wasn't asked to download an app to do it. This is an MSN page, though, which is incredibly obnoxious and filled with all sorts of weird crap that makes it harder to see the article.

The headline could read: Parents and children are waking up to the student loan con game.

CSU is the cheaper state university system in California. It costs like $6,000 per year for in-state students. If they were waking up to the con game, more would be going there.

Which is still about twice of what I paid for my entire bachelors and masters education in germany and it included a ticket for the entire public transport system in my city for the entire 5 years and full access to _very_ comprehensive library (of both physical books and e-books so there was no need to buy even a single book during my studies).

I may speak from a perspective of ignorance here but I believe 6000$ a year is still prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, especially if they don't want to accrue debt.

Americans take home a lot more money than Germans.

I don’t know, I think it’s still a good deal, I’d rather have cheap tuition and low taxes than high taxes and no tuition

Agree, it's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.

It's an infinity% more than what I paid for university in Poland

Some were even payed for university. Those were times when almost nobody actually could afford to pay, socialism, <beep>

>I may speak from a perspective of ignorance here but I believe 6000$ a year is still prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, especially if they don't want to accrue debt.

Reality is almost no one pays that. Out of state and international students are just about the only folks paying tuition at CSU. Nearly everyone else is covered by the various state/federal grants, and community colleges are essentially free.

At one point, California had free community college. They could have expanded that to CSU instead of charging for CC as well.

But some people in the ownership class have to get new yachts...

It's not just the cost of tuition, cost of attendance in California is extremely high because cost of living in California is extremely high. You'd have to compare it with enrollments across the country.

Tuition and non-tuition costs have both absolutely skyrocketed and made CSUs unaffordable for a lot of people. I went to Cal Poly, my entire freshman year was ~$6000 in 1997. It was an even split between $3k tuition and 3k student housing/food. I could actually mostly pay my own tuition without finical aid, holding a part time campus job.

Today those numbers are $11.5k tuition and ~21.5k non-tuition (https://www.calpoly.edu/financial-aid/costs-and-affordabilit...) which is triple the inflation adjusted value from 1997. After 4 years (5 more likely) you're looking at > $125k in costs, which absolutely puts most people into massive loan debt. Even a part time job ($16/h) would offset barely a third of this.

CSU is just beyond expensive compared to 20 years ago.

In-state tuition for the CSUs is on the order of $13,000/yr. I don't think an aversion towards student loans explains this.

If only that even closely resembled the true cost to attend college.

For comparison, when I went to CSUC it cost ~$3000/year for tuition (2024 dollars).

And boy were we pissed at Pete Wilson for making it cost that much.

The only thing that makes it worth becoming a grade school teacher is PSLF. Otherwise you'd be in debt for life.

Situation is dire.

If by con you mean "a degree is worth, on average, about $1 million over a career vs high school only".[1]

Yes, there are degrees that don't confer an obvious or immediate value, but on whole, college still pays off, even with loan interest included.

And I don't mean to imply college shouldn't cost less, it should.

https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-do-college-graduates-e...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com