The decline in the number of 18-year-olds is projected to cause a wave of college closures, posing a significant challenge to higher education and the economy.
The long-predicted downturn in the number of 18-year-olds is almost here. And it isn't just a problem for higher education. It's a looming crisis for the economy.Colleges and universities collectively experienced a 15% decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Pickup trucks with trailers and cars with yawning trunks pulled up onto untended lawns in front of buildings from which people lugged books, furniture, mattresses, trophy cases and artwork. Anything else of value had already been sold by a company that specializes in auctioning off the leftover assets of failed businesses. At least one of the buildings was soon to be demolished altogether, its red-brick walls dumped into its 1921 foundation. This was the unceremonious end of Iowa Wesleyan University, a 181-year-old institution that closed in 2023 after financial losses due in part to discounts it gave out as it struggled to attract a shrinking pool of students. When a college closes,'all the things that are mementos of the best four years of a lot of people's lives are sold to the highest bidders,' says Doug Moore, founding partner of a firm that has helped handle the logistics of shutting down four colleges in the last few years, including Iowa Wesleyan.The outlook, Moore and other experts say, is that there will likely be many more such scenes in the years ahead. That's because the current class of high school seniors scheduled to graduate this spring will be the last before an expected long decline begins in the number of 18-year-olds — the traditional age of students when they enter college.This'demographic cliff' has been predicted ever since Americans started having fewer babies at the advent of the Great Recession around the end of 2007 — a falling birth rate thatDemographers say it will finally arrive nationwide in the fall of this yea
DEMOGRAPHIC CLIFF COLLEGE CLOSURES EDUCATION ECONOMY BIRTH RATE
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