Plunging US Birth Rate Leaves Too Many Colleges with Too Few Kids | Hacker News Reader

Plunging US Birth Rate Leaves Too Many Colleges with Too Few Kids

bloomberg.com

54 pointstoomuchtodo46 comments

Maybe they’ll you know, lower their prices so more people can afford it. Haha.

Best they can do is hire more admin staff.

They’re going to expand the tuition-base into new markets, any decade now!

"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.

Maybe third tier colleges can start rebranding and advertising the “Animal House Experience”

Hasn't that experience been long over? Recent generations are much tamer.

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.

> secret societies

Maybe they got better at being secret

I think the freemasons are still around. Kinda awesome that it shares continuity with the freemasonry of some prominent figures, like Washington. Can't imagine joining now without it feeling like a massive larp, though.

It was always a massive larp. If you try to join they will tell you what they do is re-enacting certain "moral plays".

Does that make it function any less effectively?

> It's too bad secret societies with mystic rites don't really exist anymore.

They were, overall, strictly harmful. Yes, there is a point where it feels good to be in them. However, they are designed for abuse, for making it difficult to leave and for making it easy to pressure members to participate on harmful acts.

The stuff Epstien did and connection he had is the modern equivalent of that. A group of powerful people tied together due to shared infraction and shared need to protect each other. It worked well for them, helped their careers, made them have social connections and friends.

I am reminded of the quote “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

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 like it, but can you imagine the liability issues with that business plan?

Why do we think trade schools will fare any better?

The USA is going to have to reindustrialize whether we want to or not. Someone needs to train the workers.

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.

Depends on which administrators you're talking about. The army of staff at my Tier 1.5 university make about $60-90k in an MCOL area. High-level admins make more, of course, but there's not an army of them! There's really only 1-2 "highly" paid people making >$120,000 in the whole IT department.

I'm not sure which other universities have "absurdly overpaid and bloated armies of administrators".

Brown University has 1 administrator for every 2 students.

This is a widely known and discussed phenomenon and is actually a running joke here in the comments.

Honestly, I'm shocked that you're unaware of this, to a degree where you're calling my comment out. I don't know what your news sources are, but they're not keeping you informed.

The "army" part largely resonates with me - I understand that universities have very high staff ratios. I even tried to openly acknowledge that in my response! I specifically used your language in my words: "the army of staff at my tier 1.5 university".

But whats the median pay for those staff members? I’m mainly arguing the “absurdly overpaid” part of the “army of absurdly overpaid admins” claim. Myself and many coworkers in this IT department have left high-pressure 60-80 hour/week jobs in tech / consulting / etc. We took a ~40% paycut (and reduction in benefits! my health insurance is very poor) in exchange for a much more relaxed environment. I was making $140,000 before this, but now I'm making $80,000 - and I'm one of the more highly-paid people in my department.

Maybe someday there will be more attention paid to adults. Every aspect of college seems built for 18 year olds.

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.

> That and the stupid shit schools do to make sure you aren't using AI.

What makes you think they care? https://youtu.be/JcQPAZP7-sE?t=881

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.

I often think it would cool to maybe work for 5 years and then spend 1 year at college deepening or broadening knowledge. I would love that rhythm.

Not every college.

Especially if all of the 18 year olds disappeared or were diluted by olds.

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).

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cpb/college-enrol...

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.

https://archive.today/m9Jyf

https://www.wiche.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024-Knocki...

https://sheeo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/SHEEO_NSCRC_Col...

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])

This is what TFA talks about as well.

[0] - https://grainger.illinois.edu/admissions/undergraduate/pathw...

[1] - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

[2] - https://www.nyu.edu/admissions/undergraduate-admissions/how-...

I expect another K shaped graph here where the top 20 universities or so located in the top 10 or 20 metros compete for the top 10% of the population while the rest are on the downward leg of the K.

Pretty soon we'll call trying to have children "giving it the old college try."

Why not project out 18 years minimum? I mean, women are not suddenly going to start giving birth to 5 year old kids ... Hell, I'm scared to think how painful that would be.

The birth rate is part of it, I think the biggest part is kids now just don't see college as how it was seen before, where a degree means stable career and life. You have OF or TikTok making in a month what they will make in a lifetime, then you have the job market, then you have the expensive tuition, and the KO was AI rendering any cert acquired in 2023 and after far less valuable than before. I personally know plenty of kids and none of them is dreaming about becoming an astronaut or an engineer or a doctor like how it was before. One wants to be a tattoo artist, another a streamer, a third in some sports, and they are around 17 years old, not children.

I think that the tattoo artist thing is kind of like wanting to be a cook, hairdresser or something similar, except it requires a lot more skill and learning. A job that does not require higher education. At 17, that person know whether they are college material or whether they can afford college. Choosing vocation that require skill they have and is cheaper to obtain may be correct choice.

I've heard lots of people cite OnlyFans but is it really a significant enough factor? Surely it's a tiny amount of people who post content there.

Need to see how the world turns in the next decade before deciding if it's one worth bringing another human into.

The US birth rate was steady from 1990 to 2010.

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.

I was about to say the same with less accuracy.

Birthrates going up or down is not a crisis. The pathological desire for slave labor and cannon fodder, that is a crisis.

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.

0: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...

They mean the total fertility rate (TFR), not birth rate. TFR is the better metric for evaluating population trends over many decades.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

They should have said total fertility rate. Birth rates have absolutely been in a steady decline for decades.

EDIT, also, looking at TFR, it's been bumping around but there was clearly a collapse in the 60s. I wouldn't use that to show that the population of the US is growing healthily enough to support capitalism.

This is correlated to the loneliness crisis. The purpose of human life, just like every other biological creature, is to have children. I have five children and I've never been happier.

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