roughly 15 percent.
Underlying this is a sharp decline in public support for universities.
colleges were too expensive. Costs had been rising far faster than not only inflation but, more critically, family incomes.
Unlike in the rest of the economy, productivity in higher education was probably falling as the staff to student ratio rose. Buildings were empty too much of the year, faculty were writing a lot of articles of little consequence for miniscule audiences. Administrative bloat was already well under way.
The single event that did more than anything to trigger the decline came on April 4, 2011 when the U.S. Department of Education in a “dear colleague” letter proclaimed that sexual violence on campus led by hrny male students was a national problem, mandating remedies making a mockery of traditional Anglo-Saxon procedures of adjudicating wrongful behavior (e.g., no right to cross examine witnesses, prosecutors often serving also as judges or the equivalent). By 2015, these procedures were widely adopted.*
The result? An exodus of men from campuses. Between 2015 and 2020, enrollment fell by nearly one million students with 87 percent of the decline being men.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cliff-fewer-college-students-mean-fewer-graduates
A looming ‘demographic cliff’: Fewer college students and ultimately fewer graduates
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.
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.
But the downturn isn’t just a problem for universities and colleges. It’s a looming crisis for the economy, with fewer graduates eventually coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, even as international rivals increase the proportions of their populations with degrees.
the number of 18-year-olds nationwide who graduate from high school each year — and are therefore candidates for college — will erode by 13%, or nearly half a million, by 2041.
The news is not all bad. For students, it means a buyer’s market.
Is the above true. Is college tuition declining?
Falling enrollment, meanwhile, has been made worse by a decline in perception of the value of a college or university degree.
My university degree had HIGH VALUE. It kept me from a rice paddy in Vietnam. I attended university 1969-1973.
Among high school graduates, the proportion going straight to college has fallen, from a peak of 70% in 2016 to 62% in 2022, the most recent year for which the figure is available.
And now politics enters into the fray.
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5324187-trump-administration-targets-foreign-students/
President Trump and his administration are going after international student visas on multiple fronts and for multiple stated reasons.