America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust
wsj.com
wsj.com
Less kids are enrolling in college due to several factors. A decline in birthrates (right around the 2008 recession), a decline in those who calculate that college provides a real return on investment and the cost of lost opportunity, and also a third strike in the form of federal funding cuts.
There's a bunch of example case sob story, a lot of emotional focus. Yet I didn't see much (obvious) about any positive paths forward.
It's far too late at this stage to prop up schools that are surplus relative to population. Re-purposing them for other educational tasks or possibly businesses (rather than just a shooting range complex) might be happening elsewhere.
College could be made less of a rat-race hassle. The core aspects of an education and experience in college probably should be more fool-proof (all the classes delivered as a scheduled package that works, threaded for multiple years with a couple slack openings for retakes). With some slack time built in for making up a dropped class or three (not entirely skipped semesters!). Also social mixer and electives courses. Though crack down on the crazy party stuff, moderation is key, and as a tea toter, I'd like to suggest a very strong look at banning all mind altering drugs (including alcohol, other than limited quantities for cooking) during the educational years.
As far as the question of if college is worth it? That might differ from person to person. Trades / Vocational work can also be fulfilling and maybe some people might enjoy that. We all need mechanics, electricians, and construction workers. Though those jobs might seriously benefit from some augmentation / automation / tech to prevent worker burn out and body damage.
By contrast in software there is extreme defacto age discrimination. I don't think it's usually real age discrimination but simply companies don't really value experience in software much, and so somebody with many years years of experience is often seen as less desirable than somebody with little to no experience, but who you can pay a far lesser wage to. Whatever the reason, the point is that software is, for most, going to be a relatively short-lived career.
I can't find a good source for the data on the age of developers, though there are a million blog style or Q/A posts bemoaning the increasing difficultly finding a job as developers age. The Stack Overflow survey [2] is probably not representative, but matches observation at least, with a median age in the younger side of the 25-34 bracket. And that brief window of time you have in software is after you [typically] spend 4 years in college, and then spend however many years paying off your college debt before you finally get to enjoy your full salary.
And obviously I am speaking big picture here. There are people who have a catastrophic injury in the trades and live the rest of their life on disability from age 22. And there are software developers still coding at 50. But these are rare exceptions, and not the rule in either case.
[1] - https://www.nahb.org/blog/2023/06/age-of-construction-workfo...
[2] - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/developer-profile#demog...
The median age of 42 just means a lot of sore 40-somethings can’t afford to quit yet. Age alone doesn’t tell you how their knees and backs feel after 20 years of rebar.
Not sure how many people you know in the industry but most architects, managers, etc... are 40+ years old. Not even remotely difficult to get hired as a senior engineer, way more in demand than 20 years old devs
And yeah obviously software has plenty of room to transition into management and other late career roles. The same is true of the trades where common later stage transitions involve starting your own shop (with a career of connections/clients made it's not the big undertaking it might sound) or moving onto teaching. But it's the same problem in both cases, a small minority of people will achieve such transitions.
[1] - https://www.bls.gov/iif/nonfatal-injuries-and-illnesses-tabl...
The trades can really destroy your body and there isn't really a way around this besides changing the working conditions.
Your assertion isn't factually based - it's just another baseless claim on the Internet.
I don't know the factual basis about the harm labor does - it's one of those things that generally don't need it for most people - but basic knowledge and reasoning is that hard, and repetitive, physical labor daily for decades is going to cause some real physical problems. Most white-collar workers I know over 40 have bad backs. I know college kids who didn't last a summer on a worksite.
And as much better evidence, we have generations of reporting on it from the people who do physical labor. Those people have also long said they worked so their kids to do something different. I've never heard one who agreed with you - I've never heard anyone who agreed with you.
If it's so great, do you think many developers in SV would take construction jobs if they paid more? Managers? Other white-collar workers? Out in the cold and rain? No remote working for those jobs. :)
> There are people who have a catastrophic injury in the trades and live the rest of their life on disability from age 22.
There are many other injuries - losing fingers and toes, serious traumatic injuries to every part of the body. I knew a painter who fell off a ladder, fell three stories and landed in the splits. But they had a family and they were back at it as soon as they healed; it wasn't without pain. If you do it every day for decades, how do you never fall from the ladder?
> the median age of a construction worker is 42. [1] In some states it's pushing near 50.
Many have no choice.
I know people whose kids skipped university and went to vocational school to become electricians or plumbers. Almost all of them have failed to land jobs, and every job they apply for they're competing with dozens of applicants. The one that got a job was forced to move halfway across the country to some rural town in the middle of nowhere to get that job.
We may all need mechanics and electricians but no one seems to want to hire an inexperienced mechanic or electrician.
It's the second and third-tier institutions located in economically depressed areas, like the one profiled here (Western Illinois University’s Macomb campus), that are suffering. After all, why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities?
To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.
The entire point is that reputable and well funded institutions with large campuses and thriving social and civic networks are doing fine. It’s small institutions that popped up to satisfy a once growing are being drained as demand falls.
Education is great, expanding your mind is great, but there is little incentive to foreclose other opportunities along the way in pursuit.
Can everyone get into those schools?
Obviously not everyone can get into every school. But overall enrollment volume across every institution is down, which means being a top X% student will get you into progressively better schools unless they cut overall class sizes. Obviously it’s the institutions at the bottom of the list which lose students first, which is the “problem” highlighted by this article.
The reality is that the economy cannot occupy all these specialists and still requires a ton of fungible generalists. In fact we made so many specialists that themselves became fungible. Look at the tech layoffs, they casually throw under the bus industry legends, simply because everyone has become nearly replaceable.
And even from a societal perspective you would think that with more knowledge we would become more tolerant, more rational etc etc. Well how did that work out?
What is that based on? I haven't heard of any such problem, other than from people who are trying to cut education funding or social mobility.
> and still requires a ton of fungible generalists.
Undergraduate college degree holders are generalists. Nobody considers you a specialist, or will hire you as such, because of your undergraduate degree. Maybe some engineering degrees, but really you need a masters degree for almost every specialist job.
> even from a societal perspective you would think that with more knowledge we would become more tolerant, more rational etc etc. Well how did that work out?
Despite the recent reactionary backlash, we still far ahead of where we were 50 years ago and even more ahead of where we were a century ago. The evidence is overwhelmingly the other way.
Check any South/Eastern European country. Tons of degrees, insanely high youth unemployment. Devastating lack of labor for businesses. Of course an engineer will prefer to stay home with their parents instead of going to work as a barista.
> Undergraduate college degree holders are generalists. Nobody considers you a specialist, or will hire you as such, because of your undergraduate degree. Maybe some engineering degrees, but really you need a masters degree for almost every specialist job.
With generalists I meant unspecialized labor: servers, farm workers, construction workers etc
I thought we were talking about the US - note the headline. I understand some less wealthy countries have that problem; I don't know why but it's an interesting question.
College is great but 1) Not for everybody and 2) only the rich can pay 50K-400K to "sharpen their minds" without a high-paying job in the other end.
We need more middle class jobs that don't require a 4-year college degree
You cannot. Very few people - geniuses - could learn on their own what a typical person learns with a teacher, and even the geniuses are far better off with a teacher working at their level.
> 1) Not for everybody
That's such a general statement that it's meaningless, not falsifiable. It's for most people.
> only the rich can pay 50K-400K
Yes, I strongly agree that's an enormous problem.
> We need more middle class jobs that don't require a 4-year college degree
That's what the people who want to cut opportunity and education say. But middle-class / poor people have dreams and want to fulfill their potential too, and are also an enormous pool of talent.
The solution is to make college affordable. Multiple presidential candidates have offered ways to do it. There's no reason we can't.
For most people, yes. For our elites, I think one of the great losses over the past generations has been this financialisation of education. Measuring ROI solely in monetary terms, thereby sacrificing the civic and cultural parts for that which is easily measured and marketed.
Growing as a person and intellectually is a great opportunity, a lifelong change. Better than some immediate cash in an entry-level job.
The library doesn't even approximate a substitute. Maybe you are a genius, but almost everyone needs teachers. Even experts need people to teach them new things, to mentor them, etc. They also need labs and equipment.
Also, the library you need for real reasearch is not free. It only exists in academia. Your local public library doesn't give you access to nearly the same resources, nor the essential reference librarians. (Maybe the NY Public Library? Does that have JSTOR, for example?)
Libgen is a solution to that.
I agree there is value to learning with experts but not at the cost we are expected to pay these days. The labs and equipment are a tiny fraction of the tuition a student pays and many disciplines do not require anymore more than pen and paper and the aforementioned resources. Why should a math and economics major pay the same as a biochem student? Because the majority of the cost is the bureaucracy and the fancy real estate investments.
On the "academic" side, I don't see how the college experience would work for a trade school, while on the "social" side, it's crazy to think you'd pay the premium for most of these things (except networking, as people often point out for "regular" colleges) when there's other avenues for socialization or sports.
I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct.
So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.
Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long.
1. https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare...
In the end I think the future will become much like the past in that fertility is essentially the point of a nation. What is a few generations of fading prosperity when the longterm cost is the very survival of said civilization? It's just a nonsense deal that nobody would ever agree to on a macro scale, but that most of all Western civilization is trending towards.
A “Korean” in 2100 might have Filipino, Indian, African ancestry.
In fact the way things are going Africa will probably end up as the nursery of the world for a few decades. Then birth rates will collapse there too.
The robots should be ready then
So you're going to end up having to import people with relatively little education, skills or experience, who don't speak, read, or write the language, have no knowledge of the culture, dramatically different working/cultural values, and so on. Europe was, in many ways, a trial run for this sort of scenario on a far smaller scale than what you're talking about, and the results have not been good. Immigration is not really a sustainable solution.
You do get weird stories like Filipino nurses treating elderly WW2 era Japanese soldiers. I’m sure it’s only awkward for a moment.
You could have said the same thing about any new immigrants anywhere. How will the Irish fit in Boston?
How will Ukrainians make it in Chicago?
In fact for all the talk about the US being a nation of migrants we never had a foreign born population exceeding 14.8%. [1] And that was in 1890 after which a large number of anti-migration bills began being passed, culminating in a low of 4.7% in 1970. It's now up to 14.3% and once again issues are emerging at almost the exact same threshold. Go figure.
---
So now let's consider your idea. South Korea is trending towards a scenario where they will eventually be losing 62% of their population every 20 years. And obviously that is exponential - it's not like it slows down, not unless they start having babies again. To maintain this decline with immigration would require literally just replacing just about the entire former population of South Korea with migrants.
You're talking about migration on a scale unimaginably larger than anything before, with what by necessity would be an extremely low quality of migrant, simply owing the massive numbers needed. So the idea of using immigration to "solve" this is essentially just proposing populating an 'abandoned' land with whoever wants to come. And of course that's possible, but obviously this is not a solution to anything by any reasonable meaning of the word 'solution.'
[1] - https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Co...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
You'll see more multicultural marriages. This has already started.
https://e.vnexpress.net/news/trend/marriages-between-vietnam...
"In 2022, out of the 792 South Korean women who entered into marriage with Vietnamese men, 556 were remarriages. Among these, 482, or 86.7%, were women who originally came from Vietnam and had become naturalized South Korean citizens. They acquired South Korean nationality through their first marriage with local men, then divorced, and later remarried Vietnamese men."
Beyond this, many/most places in Asia have a culture that views previously married women, or single women over a certain age, very negatively. In China the term is 'leftover women.' That can make it difficult for these women to marry a local, and make it very easy for a foreigner to find a wife that may be more desirable than one he might be able to find in his own country. But it's not doing much of anything for fertility.
---
But more generally, what you're implying here is that fertility is a cultural problem and not necessarily an e.g. economic one. And I completely agree with you on that. But you're essentially aiming to change the culture by simply bringing in an inconceivably large bunch of new people (relative to previous migrations) and assuming things will turn out okay. But wouldn't it be rather less extreme to simply push for sustainable cultural values to begin with? Most Western nations are still fairly close to sustainable levels.
Completely change a culture that's developed over hundreds of years to make life too stressful to raise a family ? The moment people(women) had the agency to opt out they did.
>Most Western nations are still fairly close to sustainable levels.
>Summary: U.S. population growth is projected to decline, and the population will become much older over time. Preventing these outcomes will require faster immigration by several multiples of its current rate.
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2024/3/22/us-de...
Immigration is holding up the populations of many western nations.
Honestly it might just be time for a economic system that doesn't demand infinite growth. Who are we to tell a 25 year old to settle down and have 2.1 kids.
This is really a triumph of individual freedom over anything else. 100 years ago you'd be 20, pressured to marry someone you don't really like, and expected to have kids even if you'd rather do something else.
The current generation is largely saying no. It's not just an economic issue, most negative population growth countries are relatively wealthy.
It's a matter of individual autonomy.
And the motivation for having a stable, and ideally growing, population isn't about economics - it's about culture. Countries aren't defined by borders, but by the people within those borders. If you simply swap the populations of America and Saudi Arabia they're not going to start acting just fundamentally different. The two countries would begin to rapidly resemble the countries the people came from, even if the old rules and establishment initially remained in place.
And Western culture has currently found itself in an unsustainable place which means that if things don't change, it will simply die only to be replaced. And I think that'd be a shame, because while it has its own deep flaws, it's undeniable that Western culture has had an extremely positive overall influence on the world.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-lar...
Your not wrong, but I think your dealing with an overly optimistic view of things. Just because someone says in a poll they want a family doesn't mean they have the means to start one.
At 19 my first girlfriend wanted twins, but it would have completely infesible for that to happen.
If we want this dream world to happen, it would need to be one where you can graduate highschool, buy a house and support a family. This mythical time has only existed once in American history.
Less people are making it. When you can barely eat, getting married and having a family isn't likely. And the decline in marriage rates supports this.
>We find that marriage rates among the middle class have declined significantly over the past 40 years and have now fallen below those in the top income quintile.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/middle-class-marriage-is-...
There is an extremely strong inverse relationship between fertility and income. And the reason for that, as you seemingly were already acknowledging yourself not long ago, is culture. We live in a wasteful culture where people are trained to want new things, and especially expensive things, solely because of advertising and culture.
Poor kids with Jordans that they can't tell apart from regular shoes blind, and mid class kids with the $1000 phones that they couldn't tell apart from a free-with-plan one for what they use them for, are the same sort of nonsense. These people are seen as gullible exploitable idiots by the corporations selling them product, and that is how all of society should see them, because it's true.
And I think people chase these things under some fantasy that it'll make them happy. But it never does - not beyond the length of time that e.g. you stick to a consistent argument, so they're left chasing carrots forever. Always planning to start that family once they finally catch that carrot. But they never do.
You get to be king of a hypothetical Western country.
How would you reverse dropping fertility rates while respecting individual freedom?
I’m open to being wrong.
And the idea for cultural shift is not hard or illogical in the least. Get rid of the consumerist mindset and you're probably 99% of the way there. Of course the problem there is that consumerism maximizes profits for corporations and GDP for politicians. Further emphasizing that the change must start with you and I. Like you said, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that infinite economic growth isn't really a realistic or even desirable goal.
There also seems to have been a collaborated push against traditional norms, which was probably just the natural extreme of expressions of freedom rather than any grand conspiracy - in fact Plato discussed this exact phenomena in his arguments against democracy thousands of years ago. And traditional norms should not define us, but they should be the norm. And indeed they already are, but you'd never know that if you paid any attention to marketing, media, and so on. Basically I think we want to create a society that walks a more reasonable middle ground rather than being on one extreme of norms = dogma, or on the other extreme of anti-norms = dogma.
Nope. The population is still strenuously opposed [0]
> A “Korean” in 2100 might have Filipino, Indian, African ancestry
Other than Filipinos, highly unlikely. There's no pull factor for SK from India or Africa unlike in much of ASEAN.
(Ironically the government is now complaining that there are too many foreigners and that everyone is speaking English).
I worked with a Chinese-American naturalized citizen who moved from PGP/Symantec to work at Stanford just long enough to get his kid the tuition discount (10 years still?). That's real love, dedication, and sacrifice for one's kids.
They used to go to these schools. There just aren't that many Chinese anymore either.
A decade ago, UIUC (mentioned in the article) was derisively called the "University of Indians and Chinese". Now, UIUC's Chinese admissions collapsed [0] - a trend that happened in every university.
The same thing will happen with Indian students within a decade, because Green Card waiting periods act as a quasi-thousands talents program, and you can demand an EU level tech salary in India with US (especially SV, Seattle, or NYC) work experience.
Already, a couple of my peers who worked at top ML labs in the Bay have begun transferring to the Indian branches of American R&D labs and/or taking faculty positions at top universites, when barely 15 years ago you would be hard pressed to find an American educated CS professor from a school like MIT, UIUC, or UW in India.
[0] - https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/29/university-il...
Is this a new trend that started in COVID? Because I was very plugged into the Chinese-studying-in-the-US trend from the China side, and I can tell you that it was still booming as of 2017.
That's when the change began.
China began limiting foreign withdrawals to $50,000 a year [0], which made it hard for Chinese international students at the undergrad level to join.
At the same time, the US began cracking down on Chinese nationals at American programs due to economic espionage attempts and monitoring Chinese nationals at American universities [1]
On top of that, the material condition did become better for Chinese scholars in high priority fields, so you did see a significant number of Chinese nationals who did research graduate programs return to China to either get tenure track or start a business in that space.
Finally, during Zero COVID (2020-2023), China placed extremely harsh exit and entry controls that basically cut Mainland China off from much of the world, and the subsequent economic slowdown made the cost proposition of studying in the US prohibitive if it wasn't a top tier program.
At this point, it has become a headache for Chinese students to go abroad, but nowadays, those that do try are doing so with the intention of staying abroad.
[0] - https://www.safe.gov.cn/en/2017/1230/1397.html
[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/18/the-chinese-communist-p...
Further thought - on the timescale of history, professors have always been (lower) middle class. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see a return to the mean…