The looming college-enrollment death spiral
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it. In voting, "more access" means "more governing power" (in principle), but in other things, it does not.
If you want to use "democratized" applied to higher-ed, it would mean more people are involved in the decision-making, leadership, or ownership.
The people control, through voting by choosing where to attend, based on what is offered. So if someplace is not offering much that anybody wants, they don't get students, and go out of business.
The word 'democratize' is often used just for 'access' through purchasing power.
Not that I agree that money should control learning. I'd like to go back to more hardcore reading/writing/arithmetic/Compiler Design. But nobody digs that.
I guess I'm saying, yes, that is how it often used. I just don't like it and think it is relatively new usage and a change in the older meaning of the word.
In the 90's when Linux was taking off, did people say Torvalds has "democratized Unix"? (honest question - I'm not sure.)
Compare with the governing structures of public universities in (most of?) Germany where there is a "senate" composed of elected representatives of professors, students, and administrative and academic staff. Now that is approaching democratic control.
> I just don't like it and think it is relatively new usage and a change in the older meaning of the word.
People have been using "democratize" to describe "more accessible to the masses" for a long time. Here's an example from 106 years ago in 1920 :
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Soviet_Russia/qflaAAAAM...
And 40 years ago a 1986 article of "microchip democratizing computing" : https://www.google.com/books/edition/Procom_s_1986_1987_Dent...
The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are also documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...
I am British by birth, and IIRC Hacker News is pretty much the only place I see "democratize" used to mean "make more widely available".
It literally does, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic
3: relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people
No son or daughter of a butcher could ever hope to study law.
I think that the opportunity for funding should have higher ties to economic demand for certain degree programs over others. I'm not opposed to people that want to go to arts programs in college, but I'm not sure that they should be taxpayer funded necessarily.
I have thought that areas where we bring in foreign workers should largely be offset with higher employer taxes and those taxes funding grants for domestic study into the fields in question. I also think we need a much broader set of trade schools for more industries than typical. Even with technology and programming.
In terms of lower high school graduation rates, I think we've dumbed down and taken things to the lowest common denominator in an extreme fashion. Common-core has failed, along with "new math" and other more modern teaching methods. My great grandmother was a teacher, and I've seen some of the text books they used in the pre-1960s, the coverage was much more thorough and difficult even at a 5th grade level than what many kids today see through the end of high school.
There should be plenty of room for vocational study as well as traditional study... but we need to stop just giving kids a pass because they're a certain age when they don't understand the core curriculem.
That number makes me very skeptical, even in 2026. Maybe what you are saying is that the unemployment figure is 11%? That would be pretty bad compared to two years ago, but within the realm of plausible if we were seeing a major upset in the employment market.
E.g. 2024 data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
Where that number is coming from, or what that time frame would be I'm not sure. But I do think it would be more interesting to see the amount of time recent grads spent unemployed or underemployed vs a presumptive snapshot of current employment state.
Sample size of <10, but a lot of my friends are at the age where their kids are graduating from undergrad recently, and pretty much zero of them are working in their field, and many are struggling to find anything at all, even retail or bartending.
Agreed, but wouldn't that be captured as 'under employment'? The stats are there for that, too, seems to be close to 20%.
I would find it believable, though not interesting, for only 11% of CS grads to have a local-median-pay, CS-related job locked in at graduation.
"In 2023–24, Bachelor’s degree production fell 5.5% compared to the previous year across CS, CE, and I departments. Among departments reporting both years, the decrease was 4.3%. Despite this drop, production remains well above pre-pandemic levels and reflects continued strength following the post-2020 rebound. CS saw a 7.4% decrease and CE a 13.3% decrease."
But it also looks like enrollment in CS programs increased in 2024/2025:
"U.S. CS departments reported an increase in new majors per department of 12.8%"
https://datavisualization.cra.org/TaulbeeSurvey/CRA_Taulbee_Survey_Report_2024.html#Bachelor%E2%80%99s_Program_Production_and_EnrollmentsI would not be confident in underemployment figures for 2025 published this early in the year. The New York Federal Reserve has published underemployment rates from 2024 only a couple months ago [1]. In it, computer science underemployment is lower than other majors, even in the mathematical and natural sciences. Aggregated new graduate underemployment has been higher in previous decades than the current level. Underemployment is the right metric to consider because it captures people who accepted lower-skill jobs in order to support themselves.
1. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
the parties, the co-eds, and the start of life from outside the direct supervision of parental units. Let's be honest, all of this education stuff is secondary to that.
The primary goal for attending college, as stated by both students and parents, is for preparation for entrance into the workforce and adult life.
One can go to the engineering or computer science building in almost any U.S. or Canadian university and observe a student population that doesn't party on a regular basis.
Let's observe revealed preferences, not stated ones.
> One can go to the engineering or computer science building in almost any U.S. or Canadian university and observe a student population that doesn't party on a regular basis.
This is a small fraction of the total college population.
Most people in college are only there because it's the default next step after high school. In fact, a lot of people in graduate school are only there because it's the default next step after a bachelor's degree.
Exactly! Not because of parties!
I think you may have misread something. 11% is closer to the unemployment or underemployment rate for recent grads, not the employment rate.
There may have been a short window during the intense layoffs where you could have looked at a specific graduation cohort and found a low rate of job placement at time of graduation, but that’s a very different statistic. Many take time off after graduation, travel, choose to go to grad school, or just don’t start job searching in earnest until after graduation.
“… a site I read…” Lol
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
That is, 7% are unemployed, and 19% aren't able to find comp sci jobs.
I suspect it's worse now, but probably not 11%?
One example from 1985 onwards that i can think of is NSF funding of supercomputer centers. 40 years ago, SIMD / vector processors with boatloads of memory were not ubiquitous, nor were shared memory multicore / multiprocessors, a situation which differs with the reality today.
This NSF funding established the 5 supercomputing centers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Ne...
and then further downstream effects include popular access to creations from the supercomputer centers, such as Mosaic from NCSA, and an expansion of ideas outside the compuserve / aol paradigms.
I think similar situations apply for other engineering disciplines, mechanical and chemical and physics and so on. Probably true for the arts in various forms: people don't have personal pipe organs to learn Bach on, for a crazy example, but universities do.
For various industries, learning requires physical equipment too expensive for individuals, historically and still.
Specific example is medical school/residency. To "DMZ" this, they'd need to ignore anything students do during gap years, ignore research too unless it's an MD-PhD program. Everyone should be going straight through unless some personal challenge forces them to delay.
I don't look to CS as an example because it's an unusual bubble on top of all that. CS degrees also became super competitive and subsequently worthless around 2000.
This is my sentiment. School counselors pushed everyone to colleges, but actively dissed trade schools. Forcing students to take classes in subjects they absolutely do not care about is a terrible idea for a secondary education track. If someone really just wants to learn a trade and have a nice life, there is nothing wrong with that.
Did CS course really just become coding boot camps? That seems like an insult to CS grads that came before. That's not a diss to boot camp attendees, but CS grad learns way more than how to code a specific language. However, if someone wants to just code, there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is interested in knowing how a CPU works or how much L2 cache improves anything. There's plenty of code that can be written with GC languages so that the coder never even has to think about any of the underpinnings of the system. There's other code that'll never work like that and requires more lower level understanding. There's plenty of work to share
It wasn’t some awful conspiracy, physical trade jobs are hard work and with no pensions or benefit protection, there’s a lot of guys struggling when their bodies are broken at 40. In the 80s, most urban trades were unionized with benefit funds etc. Not the case in 2026.
I know plenty of trades people that do hard work and think cushy office gigs are hell on earth and that type of work sucks ass. Just because it's not your preferred career doesn't mean you should denigrate those that do. Besides, if there were no trades, you'd have no place to live, you'd have no food to eat, you'd have no car to drive, and you'd have no internet as who was going to build that infrastructure?
It’s a brutal lifestyle and I’ve seen my share of hardworking, broken 50 year olds trying to make it mostly on the lesser paying job their wife is left with because raising kids with a dad who’s out the door at 5am and home at 7pm is brutal.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/educatio...
That does not seem like everyone is going to college.
In Europe only about 43% have a college degree. So even with heavily subsidized schools there is really only a certain percentage of people that take this path.
[1]:https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
This is mostly an unintentional side-effect of civil rights law, stemming from Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
“ I don’t know about anyone else here, but college was not educating because I was at college. I did all of the reading and studying on my own. The classes weren’t very interesting, most of my TAs didn’t speak the native language well at all, nor did half the professors. I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college learned all those same skills, for free. Education won’t be ruined or blemished my LLMs, the whole thing was a joke to begin with. The bit that ruined college was unlimited student loans… and all of our best and brightest folks running the colleges raping students for money. It’s pathetic, evil, and somehow espoused.
I remember my calc teachers, married, last name gulick, university of maryland. The calc book was sold as the same book for calc 1/2/3. The couple, gulick were the authors. Every semester they released a new edition, the only thing that changed was the problem set numbers. So, if you took calc 1/2/3, you spent $200/semester for the same fucking book. Magical times.”
In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And then that got interpreted narrowly as the skills you need in your first job after graduation. But a full career is 40+ years. Even when the job market was not changing as quickly as now, nobody could predict the skills you would need 20 years later. If you bought that viewpoint, you spent years preparing for the first few years of your career, which was obviously wasteful.
The actual value proposition was already stated 200+ years ago:
> There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
Of course, colleges can be made more cost-effective by focusing more narrowly on education. For some reason, American higher education ended up being weirdly collectivist in an otherwise individualist culture. The ideal college experience became a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. You live on a campus outside the real world, and that campus is located in a place few people would otherwise move to. The incentives got weird, and colleges started prioritizing aspects of the college experience that are not directly related to education.
College either needs to be 1) way cheaper, 2) mainly for the state-subsidized exceptional and independently wealthy, or 3) move to a different model.
We have too many colleges LARPing as Harvard, and too few colleges even attempting to be affordable, practical, or actually deliver value to the ordinary person.
A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements, now most people think you are crazy for suggesting such a thing. I think you can trace a lot of the problems in the western world back to this.
Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
By far the worst offender.
> health care for wealthy retirees
Theoretically, they paid into the system to get their dues.
> Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
There's evidence at the State level, at least in many states, it does not pay for itself.
For what it's worth, I see arguments like this all the time. Might just be the corner of the information ecosystem you hang out in.
> Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
Maybe it did in the past, where the greatest marginal gains were. Does it still hold true now? Over a third of the US has a bachelor's degree. Is there a reliably positive ROI to society in taking that third to, say, half?
You could copy-paste these statements to describe American healthcare vs European healthcare and get a very different reaction. Even though it's true for that field too.
Why the actual fuck does a humanities degree cost anywhere near as much as an engineering degree? Literally all you need is some professors and a space to teach in. You could run them in co-working spaces, parks (weather permitting), or coffee shops ffs, with no administrative staff or other bloat. (For real: small seminars in a coffee shop or a public park would be dope)
Education is beneficial to society and making it cheaper makes it more widely accessible. You and the person you responded to actually agree on a lot.
> A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements
I don't believe those strong assertions you're making were uncontroversial at any time, and are likely objectively less true now than they were in the past.
European universities are not resorts like in the US and community college keep that small footprint mentality as well. They have done it right. Focus on the education and keep costs lower. I have friends in Europe that work for a few years then just take time off and study something that interests them in their subsidized universities and I am so jealous because their costs are so low.
When I went to community college (and then university) there were a few moments where I actually wasn't treading water in my CS degree and I was able to take a wide variety of classes. They were some of the happiest moments of my life.
Recently visited LA and walked around LACC during the evening. The campus is enormous (and famously was the scene for the TV show Community). I just thought of the enormous variety of subjects being taught, imagine if that was accessible to anyone when they desired.
My daughter got her associates carrying no debt... but has struggled to get into an appropriate higher level program. She's currently working PT in two jobs, one as a prep cook in a high end eatery and as a park associate at the local zoo. Neither is offering a particularly compelling pay or benefits that most jobs should offer IMO.
I'm with you on college though, in terms of there should be way cheaper options all around... I think there should even be grant programs for better vocational/trade programs as an alternative path for Bachelors class degrees.
What's the secondary source then?
This is the only real answer.
IME, CS as a profession, doesn't need to concern itself with maintenance, secure coding practices, administration, system implementation, etc. There's no class called "maintaining this POS code base from 10 years ago."
CS folk fail when they don't make the top of a leader board for sorting algos.
Software Engineers fail if they tell you that maintenance requires 10 manual touch points over a weekend.
Different concerns. While software engineering is built upon CS fundamentals, ultimately your concern is with what's coming years down the line when your unpatched "hack week" project is underpinning the business model.
That's absolutely what I think, since even before the proliferation of LLMs.
Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
It costs something, but doesnt have to be ridiculous. Apart from infrastructure and basic security & defense(since we have russia trying to conquer us all in Europe) the only really valuable investments.
The test of Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" is a pretty good way of cutting through the details and getting to what matters: if you had to be reborn as someone in any country (or, had to choose between two, if we wanted to e.g. rank them), and you couldn't control anything about the circumstances (race, social status, money, intelligence level, disabled or not, et c.) but were leaving it up to a die roll based on the demographics of the place—which would you choose? The ones you're more-inclined to choose are the better ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
And yeah, stuff like ensuring the worst-likely-case for a resident isn't that bad, and that you get a significant helping hand to improve your lot, helps a ton to make a country more appealing, in this sort of thought experiment. Far, far more than e.g. making sure the few very-best-off really run away with the prize (which improves the appeal of such a place basically not at all).
Funny how despite all that, more people choose to come to the US from those "mature" societies than the other way around.
According to https://archive.is/Gyl7y the usual suspects do poorly, such as performance arts, but also things like criminal justice, environmental studies and many of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
People trot out the "college grads earn more" lines ad nauseum but the numbers haven't been looking good for that argument for years.
I am not seeing that? Computer Science, to use an easy example, is 19.1% underemployed. Bad, but not 50%. Even restricted to 'recent graduates' it does not look that grim? If I'm misreading the data, please correct me. I have kids approaching the age where they will be considering post-secondary choices so I am trying to keep an eye on things.
So it's not that bad after all. At least you got the job, while somebody else didn't.
This is just me thinking. Never been to the US and I'm guessing that's what the discussion is about.
With that said, there's also a lot of jobs that list a college degree as a requirement that absolutely don't need one whatsoever. I suspect this is largely to cut down on the number of applicants.
Back when applications were done on paper, I recall turning one in to a prospective employer, who set it on a stack of paper around 15cm tall, which just so happened to be right next to a trash can. Now that you can apply to 50 jobs in an hour because job application sites basically pre-fill applications for you, it's insane what hiring is like in any city bigger than a small town.
Original: Animal and plant sciences: 53%
Biochem: 42
Biology: 51
Chemistry: 42
Engineering technologies: 44
Medical technician: 47
Miscellaneous Biological Science: 47
Miscellaneous Technologies: 49
Those were the ones that caught my eye. I'm assuming the "miscellaneous" categories are for higher degrees in very niche or specific sub fields.
STEM covers all of science, math and tech outside of medicine/ health care, so the computer science and engineering tracks are okay. Even then, I'd be a little suspect, as I'd heard elsewhere that the number of graduates has increased by 110% but the market for jobs hasn't. The good old days of ZIRP and wildly too-small talent pool are likely over for good.
I've long been under the impression (might be quite wrong, of course) that a number of science fields suffer from a problem where bachelor's degrees have very little practical value because the career expectation in the field is a graduate degree.
This is probably bias on my part since my most direct exposure to the phenomenon is a couple of my extended family members who got degrees in biology but then exited higher education. They can't get jobs in biology, they are stuck working jobs that would have been just as attainable right out of high school.
Instead we're going to very expensive camp where most of the people flaunt laws for fun (there's no reason alcohol should be illegal for undergrads) and then grind to pass tests while not actually learning all that much OR becoming all that prepared for the world after university.
Particularly with how poorly academics are paid, it would be pretty damn easy to build a better university.
It's not at all surprising people are leaving, university degrees are becoming minimum quarter million dollar participation trophies.
The vast majority of college degrees are nowhere near that. Average in-state tuition in the US is something like $9,000.
Now, some people want a trophy from Stanford, but that's a separate topic.
Being an engineer vs. being an engineer tech is a substantially life-quality difference.
But only if you choose to attend (I would not re-attend).
I would also suggest looking at the ABET certification interval for different campuses. It was a point of pride on our campus that we had a longer interval compared to the more established campus. We got the longer interval because ABET trusted our program to not need constant supervision.
Rougly speaking, it cuts the professional experience requirement in half, and makes the entire process of becoming a P.E. (professional engineer) much simpler (not easier).
There are multiple field tests, including the Fundamentals & Engineering exam that allows you to 2x your eng.tech. experience.
There's disruption but not the good kind. The reckoning is cheating not demographics.
Universities need to do very much less that isn't directly related to research or teaching and stop pretending the lead administrator of a university is an important position. The president of a university should have the pay and prestige that goes along with administering the parking garage and cafeteria and have few responsibilities or accolades beyond that.
How will Disney get to profit off of selling college athletes as an entertainment product?
If college is accessible to even the poorest Americans, how will we maintain the claim that they are bastions of liberal brainwashing against millions of conservative people getting reasonable educations in basic things like "Political Science" that don't actually force them to become communists at all?
Who will ensure that only those who "Deserve" it can afford to get a degree through byzantine FAFSA workflows and departments? Who will ensure that being middle class means you have to pay out of pocket instead of getting a couple thousand dollars?!
Government data on university expenditures show that at a broad level the increases in instructional and student-related expenditures are modest. Much of the increase is in the aforementioned medical systems, and in the Graduate and Faculty research enterprises:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a...
There is a substantial collection of things that share this need.
But who is gonna pay for these? (half-/s)
Reality is, employers don't want to pay the bill for job training centers or for German-style apprenticeship education. Universities aka degree mills are what keeps most large employers afloat - depending on the system, it's either the talent themselves (US via student loans), the government itself (Germany) or a mixture of both paying the bills, while employers get fresh trained talent without paying a dime.
The article doesn't seem to mention foreigners - particularly Chinese. Are those numbers expected to grow or shrink?
Some do, some pay nothing: https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2023/05/31/minnesota...
Perhaps you're already implying this, but for Europe to drain intellectual capital from the US, it would have to offer a hell of a lot more than cheap college for foreign students.
When you are 20 you don't need sleep.
Surely a large part of this problem that the article doesn't mention is that college is too fucking expensive. And an obvious solution to that is to tax rich people and use that to fund universities so that students don't have to go so far in debt in order to become productive members of society.
It's crazy how many problems today boil down to "a tiny fraction of elites are hoarding all the wealth" and yet we seem to assume the solution of "tax them and use that money to benefit others" is simply impossible.
Ideally, you would want them to be intentionally educated to a specific type of manipulable gullibility, where they are receptive to your messages, but resistant to messages from other sources.
A congregation trained to say “amen” on cue.
If you care about voting, fix primary and secondary education. The universities aren't the main problem.
This is pretty silly. Any amount of new knowledge tends to make the brain more critical. The only real exception is rote memorization without application.
By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE. Why are we contemplating building a new patio and switching to Whole Foods when we're not even on pace to pay off the house??
1: https://manhattan.institute/article/correcting-the-top-10-ta...
I disagree, and I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument.
My metric for whether a tax system is progressive enough is pretty simple: is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
Some amount of inequality is healthy. The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
> By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE.
Good point! It would be really great if the government wasn't funneling billions into the coffers of defense companies by starting nonsense wars.
Cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations and going into greater debt for it is a two-handed gift to the rich: they pay less taxes and they make money directly from the government by being paid interest when they loan money to the government.
Do you only ingest ideas from places that you're already inclined to believe? How do you get challenges to your beliefs?
> is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
> Some amount of inequality is healthy.
What amount of inequality is just right, then? On one hand you suggest that we should redistribute to lower inequality, but on the other you seem to see some kind of beneficial role, or at least a neutral role, of inequality in a society.
> The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
Countries as diverse as Sweden, the Philippines, and Nigeria all have worse inequality in wealth than the US[0]. On the other end, countries like Iceland, Myanmar, and Turkmenistan have similarly low wealth inequality. I might posit that wealth inequality doesn't even make the top 10 of what makes a health society that's nice to live in.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Nonetheless, our ideas about social justice clearly differ. You abhor inequality in itself, I abhor poverty. So perhaps it won't make sense to argue the facts.
I do want to point out also that while it would certainly be good to eliminate unnecessary "defense" spend, it won't be close to enough. By far the biggest sources of deficit are entitlements: social security, Medicare, Medicaid. No one seriously proposes cutting taxes on the wealthy. It might be nice for the sake of fairness (you'd disagree) but unfortunately we will need a painful period of increased tax on everyone paired with serious cost-cutting if we intend to balance the budget... without just printing more dollars, which is basically another tax.
A system of heavily subsidized post-secondary vocational schools, like what Germany has, seems like a better path.
That seems more relevant to new CS grad unemployment than AI.
In the mid 90's, my affluent suburban high school was in panic mode, afraid that declining enrollment was an impending death spiral. My graduating class only had gasp 750+ students. Ten years after I graduated, entering the 2000's, enrollment had already surpassed 800 kids. The school had to build out an entire wing and completely remodel the athletic building to accomodate all the new students that were enrolling.
Likewise, attending college in North Dakota saw the same thing in the late 90's. Sheer panic the entire North Dakota college system was about to enter an enrollment desert. They wondered how can the Universities recruit more out-state students. Again, by early to mid aughts? Enrollment was off the charts. They had to buy buildings in the downtown area and convert them to a new "downtown campus" for several emerging and expanding majors. The campus saw a constant upgrade of facilities and buildings. It was completely the opposite. The entire system saw a massive transformation that continues to this day:
As of Fall 2025, the North Dakota University System (NDUS) reports a total headcount of 47,552 students, marking a 3.8% increase over 2024 and reaching its highest level since 2014. The University of North Dakota (UND) specifically achieved a record-breaking enrollment of 15,844 students in 2025, surpassing its previous 2012 record. Across the system, growth is driven by rising undergraduate numbers and an increase in high school students.
Over the past five or so years, there's been a small fluctuation, but overall the system has been surging as of late and is on solid ground for the next decade or so.
The North Dakota system is the very kind of system the article says is about to be greatly affected by the year 2040. That would require quite a drop off from where they currently are and the amount of growth they're having right now.
Again, I don't buy this since many of the people who are from out-state, many of them will settle down in North Dakota cities, get married and start families there. The cost of living is super low and its a very tax friendly state compared to many of its neighbors like Minnesota. Fargo, where NDSU (and by proxy Moorehead University and Concordia College) is located is still one of the fastest growing cities in the state, growing steadily at about a 2% pace annually. Which means the supply side of the equation isn't likely to die out any time either.
My sister and I were both groomed to go to college. We attended the standard college prep high schools. The choices were laid before us. Mom told me definitely not to attend UC Berkeley (because of the hippies and anti-war protests.) So, I chose UCSD and my parents basically handled all the paperwork; I sat down to write an essay, and I was totally in.
However, mental illness ruled my life and I dropped out of classes. An excuse by my therapist got me restarted but not for very long before the second dropout. I tried community college for a semester and earned one more good grade (in C programming). I started work, foolishly believing that would go better than college! My life fell apart around me and college remained unfinished for decades.
Finally by 2017 I was stable enough to consider college again. Of course I should have understood that my career was not a thing, and at that point, college was the frivolous pipe-dream of an aging guy unable to really support himself. Nonetheless, I did the FAFSA, and Uncle Sam paid for the rest of my college bills.
I again dropped out, for reasons of being less-than-stable, but I had managed to earn 3 CompTIA certifications and I also landed a very nice job, which I held for over 4 years. None of those would've been possible without the drive to finish college.
Ultimately, the community college found a way to "graduate me" and award me a certificate of completion (instead of the Associate's in Applied Science which I was pursuing.) My "graduation ceremony" occurred in the US Postal Service station. Receiving that certificate was 100% a surprise, but a Pyrrhic victory.
At this point, I achieved my "bucket list" of graduating college, but I have 0 career prospects, and the certificate means 0 to my former or prospective employers (the certifications also meant nothing to them!)
So what did Uncle Sam really pay for? My personal satisfaction? Just to funnel more taxpayer money to the college system? I am fine with that, I suppose.
But it just goes to show that far more families push their children to attend college, and the expectations are set too high, when many kids growing up really need some vocational skills and real-life street smarts to survive in this world. Tuition prices have been jacked-up absurdly by the proliferation of scholarships and grants. "Diversity" means any view except conservatives or Christians. We are in need of a reckoning, especially for land-grant and "Ivy League" institutions.
Conservatives.
They require an uneducated and ignorant electorate. It’s the only way they can hoodwink voters into voting against their own best interests.
Against this backdrop, there was no world in which the price of higher education wasn't going to go dramatically up.
The data I have shows that expenditures have gone up, but no where near what the nameplate tuition has or what detractors claim:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a...
College Board data shows that Tuition and Fees net of financial aid has fallen by significant amounts over the past 20 years (see page 18). Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities:
https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends-in-Colleg...
CPI component calculations done by the BLS shows "College tuition and fees", including adjustments for scholarships and grants, had a 63% increase from 2009 (to match the CB data baseline) to now, which outpaces overall inflation of 56% over the same timeframe. I'm not sure what methodology CB uses to show falling inflation-adjusted prices.
Granted, it's not a massive difference in those percentages[0], but because college is a large single-ticket item, that difference is probably felt more acutely.
> Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities
In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.
[0]: As an aside, it's incredible that everyone half of their purchasing power in ~15 years, and a quarter in just the past 5 years alone.
That's true, but as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.
I think we largely agree overall, the CPI numbers are close enough that I wouldn't dispute them; they align with my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices.
> In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.
This is probably true, and campuses could run housing at less-than-market rates. Whether that would be a better model than just giving students more financial aid that then gets paid back to the University as rent is something we'd have to model. Either way, my point is that we've seen a significant increase in the cost of rent across the entire country in the post-COVID era. That makes the Cost of College seem higher, but is something that Universities are subject to as much as a cause of.
Just pointing out that nonprofits do not have to balance revenues and expenditures at all. This is not a mere technical detail. Profit cannot inure to owners with nonprofits as it can with for-profits, but this does not prevent the organization from building up a surplus over time, nor does it prevent them from paying employees very handsomely. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have almost one hundred universities with endowments over a billion dollars.
> my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices
That's fair, but I suppose there's more to it than that. Any number of datasets point to the cost of admin rising far above the cost of faculty or maintenance; and a lot of them actually show on an inflation-adjusted basis that schools are spending less now on instruction than they did a decade or two ago. So perhaps there's enough truth to the idea that you're getting substantially less education per dollar than you used to.
I'm not an expert in non-profit accounting, but my general understanding is that it's not generally allowed to divert non-profit revenue into reserves at scale. The billions of endowments all come from non-budgeted and one-time gifts to the university.
> That's fair, but I suppose there's more to it than that. Any number of datasets point to the cost of admin rising far above the cost of faculty or maintenance; and a lot of them actually show on an inflation-adjusted basis that schools are spending less now on instruction than they did a decade or two ago. So perhaps there's enough truth to the idea that you're getting substantially less education per dollar than you used to.
All the above statements are true, but they all rely on the same error. Money spent by a university on research administration, or healthcare administration has zero relevance to the amount of money spent on Instructional administration. In order to make the argument that the cost of admin has gone up to the detriment of instruction, you'd want to exclude the administrative staff dedicated to non-instructional tasks.
As an example, if UCLA opens a new hospital in SoCal (not near any current UCLA undergraduates), they must staff that hospital with thousands of medical professionals. Sure, you can say the doctors are faculty, but you are still hiring thousands of nurses, technicians, janitors, cafeteria workers, etc. That makes the administrative cost of the University go up, but the Instruction is exactly the same.
Similarly, if UCLA gets a $100 million dollar grant for graduate-level AI research, they're going to have to hire quite a few staff members to administer that grant, to pay the researchers and grad students who are funded by that grant, to purchase and manage the computers full of GPUs, to build the building for the people and the datacenters for the servers, and to file the mountains of audit paperwork that the federal government requires in order to get the money and show that there wasn't any Waste, Fraud, or Abuse. All of the staff (AKA administrators) that make that happen now show up as an administrative cost of the University, and end up in a naive calculation of "increases in administration at UCLA", despite the fact that all of their salaries are paid (legitimately) by the $100 million grant that UCLA received, and instruction is completely unaffected by this.
This is why I like the expense data from the Education Department. It at least tries to break out the expenses related to non-Instructional things (Research, Hospitals, etc.) There may be an interesting discussion to be had as to whether Universities are spending more on Instruction or Student Services per-head in real dollars, but I pretty much never see intelligent discussion rooted in those numbers; instead it's the common, "Harvard has 4x the administrative staff today that it did in 1980. Outrageous!"
So, an individual student will be expected to have higher earnings with more schooling. But as a matter of public policy that involves taxpayer funding of higher education, I cannot accurately base those decisions on a methodology that assumes a cost of zero ("no direct schooling costs").
Your source also identifies that higher marginal returns are found in lower-income, lower-educated countries, which makes sense. How much marginal return (for the taxpayer dollar) can we expect in a high-income country with a service-based economy and a third of the population already having a bachelor's degree?
The study measures benefit of education. If you wish to determine whether cost>benefit, join it with research on the cost of education.