Colleges Helped Cause the Enrollment Crash

There is considerable talk these days about the enrollment crash in higher education, especially in liberal-arts education. The Chronicle of Higher Education has been expressing worry about this crisis for several years and has provided evidence supporting it.

In 2019, Bucknell University’s former vice president for enrollment management, Bill Conley, penned one such article, describing how college enrollment constriction had long been predicted and was finally manifesting itself. Endlessly rising tuition, stagnating American wages, and a steady decline in the birth rate could point in only one direction. As Conley put it, “Those who saw modest high-school graduation dips by 2020 as surmountable must now absorb the statistical reality: Things are only going to get worse.”

Conley focused on the demographics (in short, Americans are producing many fewer children) and the drop in demand for higher education. He did not speculate much on the why.

Another CHE article from early 2021, by economics professor Nathan Grawe, equally avoided discussion of the causes of the enrollment decline but offered tips to institutions on how to weather the storm. His recipe was for colleges and universities to fully embrace methods such as test-optional admissions to admit students who could not otherwise make the grade. He admitted, however, that this would do nothing to grow the overall pot of potential students given the demographic decline.

Grawe ended with “reason(s) to be optimistic about higher education’s future,” though it is not clear why he thinks this a reasonable conclusion from the data. Recent numbers confirm Conley’s dire prediction from 2019. As of this fall, the total number of enrolled undergraduates in the country is down almost 10 percent, which amounts to almost a million and a half fewer college students in the past two years alone.

But at the same time enrollment in four-year institutions is falling, two-year colleges and skilled trade programs are experiencing growth. Evidence suggests that potential students and their parents are working carefully through the math, comparing the cost of education to the eventual pay rates of graduates. Many are changing course on where to invest their education dollars.

The economics are certainly a big part of what is going on. When a commodity becomes so expensive and its perceived value drops so low, a downturn in consumption is expectable. Economics is not everything, however. Unexplored in the Chronicle’s investigation of this matter is the way the culture of higher education has operated to undermine its own continuing existence.

The unrelentingly, radicalizing social-justice spirit of contemporary higher education includes open denunciation of people at the higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum. They have long made up the lion’s share of families paying full tuition, shouldering a disproportionate part of the work of making higher education economically feasible.

I have heard that denunciatory sentiment expressed dozens of times on my campus by faculty members. Wealthy students, and especially wealthy white students, are described as an unwieldy burden on the new mission of higher education, which is, of course, social justice. These “privileged brats” too often chafe under ideological programming designed to make them feel responsibility for things that happened before their birth. They take up spaces that might be more fruitfully given to students from “historically disadvantaged groups,” who can be counted on to be more amenable to indoctrination given their reliance on a system of redistribution for their presence on college campuses.

[Related: “Good News on College Affordability”]

No opportunity is missed to paint the full-tuition students (and their parents) as reactionary enemies of the new calling of higher education. The critics seldom consider the economics of removing students who pay the full ticket and replacing them with others who rely heavily on financial aid.

The stupidification and politicization of our standards and curricula are part of the effort, alluded to by Grawe, to bring in a broader spectrum of students. (Sadly, he doesn’t name it for what it is.) On this topic, almost no one wants to talk about the obvious fact that standardized tests are not the only thing that will have to go. Traditional grading systems, in which only a minority of students achieve excellence and the majority by definition do average work, are also an impediment to the goals of social justice.

In most of the humanities and social sciences—especially the overtly political “Studies” fields—rigor has fallen completely into the abyss. Social-science disciplines that were once oriented toward the scientific method and quantification are now essentially just applications of the catchall “cause” of oppression as the answer to all questions. Humanities fields that formerly required students to read the wide canon of Western literature and history now use graphic novels and television programs as their central texts.

Grade inflation is a fact, and every honest observer inside the institutions knows it. The activist professoriate, however, denies it, since it starkly reveals what corners have been cut to make room for the new, “diverse” student body.

Parents and potential students are learning about all of this, if slowly and imperfectly. They are voting with their feet against an expensive but obviously dumbed-down “education” that does not increase job prospects for grads but actively promotes emotion and ideology in the place of knowledge.

The demographic revolution that has produced many fewer children per family is affected strongly by economic factors, but it’s impossible to deny that our colleges preach a culture that’s inimical to the birth and raising of children.

I sometimes ask students to think seriously about the question of whether every paid job in the external workforce offers a greater contribution to human flourishing than the domestic work done by parents—female and male—who dedicate the lion’s share of their work-lives to childcare and the maintenance of the home. Why do so many Americans think that someone working, e.g., in an advertising company, trying to dream up ways to influence people to buy the latest piece of communicative technology, is doing more important work than a mother or a father caring for her or his children?

Higher education bolsters the culture that preaches the message that families aren’t particularly important.

Whole departments (Women’s Studies, for example) and parts of others (much of the social sciences) are dedicated to propagating the line that everything about the traditional sex-based division of labor (men predominantly working outside the home, women predominantly working inside it) and the traditional approach to family (married two-parent couples and children) were evil manifestations of patriarchal oppression rather than successful responses to social needs.

[Related: “How Universities Destroy Human Capital”]

The demographic revolution did not come from the sky. It came in large part from feminism and progressive ideology about the family. The institutions of higher education have been a central site for the dissemination of those ideas.

The aftermath of the Dobbs decision provides a lucid recent example. At many campuses, “seminars” and “teach-ins” on “reproductive rights” sprouted up after Dobbs like grass in the springtime. What is meant by “reproductive rights”? The protection of the Roe-invented “right” to abort, of course, but, more broadly, a cultural framework in which pregnancy and childbirth are essentially negative things. In that view, the most important goals are the blending of the sexes into an unvarying sameness and the generation of high incomes.

This cultural logic requires women to see family and children as possible impediments to such goals, and many women who go into college desiring children come out of it with a quite different view. Men, too, are rigorously socialized there into this new feminist culture.

The stupidification of curricula goes hand in hand with the stupidification of the faculty. As new approaches to “knowledge” have arisen, reducing knowledge to a few universal claims (“It’s structural racism”; “It’s patriarchy”), the professorial class has been transformed. Given our new class of students—weakly qualified, tepid about learning, and in need of coaxing to stay the course in college—we need a new type of professor.

The traditional professor was a receptacle of hard-won knowledge in a discipline that she or he had been hired to transmit to students. That professor has now been replaced by a hybrid cheerleader/mental-health therapist/counselor/entertainment facilitator/social worker/pseudo-parent/friend and confidante.

Think what you like about the new job description of professors. There is no way someone can spend considerable time doing all those jobs and remain a scholar and teacher.

Another force driving the rejection of higher education in many quarters is the steady drift into ideological conformity. Diversity is everywhere on campus, but nowhere is there much talk about diverse ideas, diverse politics, and diverse worldviews.

Sources like the Chronicle, so interested in talking about the demographic crisis, never mention the factors contributing to it that I have discussed here. Higher education is going to get what it deserves because it has failed to sustain its traditional mission and traditional culture.


Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on December 7, 2022 and is republished here with permission.

Image: Adobe Stock

Author

  • Alexander Riley

    Alexander Riley is professor of sociology at Bucknell University and a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. His writing can be found at https://alexanderriley.substack.com/. All views expressed are his and do not represent the views of his employer.

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6 thoughts on “Colleges Helped Cause the Enrollment Crash

  1. Amazing how supposedly educated people can be so dumb. Some comments:

    ” [Grawe’s] recipe was for colleges and universities to fully embrace methods such as test-optional admissions to admit students who could not otherwise make the grade.” So why would you want to admit students who are not academically qualified? Such students are unlikely to last past the first semester. Oh wait. The college will get to collect a semester of tuition. Never mind.

    “Unexplored in the Chronicle’s investigation of this matter is the way the culture of higher education has operated to undermine its own continuing existence.” Anyone surprised by that? To the left, nothing is their fault. Ever.

    “[historically disadvantaged groups] who can be counted on to be more amenable to indoctrination given their reliance on a system of redistribution for their presence on college campuses.” The overwhelming number of faculty—particularly in the liberal arts—believe college should always be fully funded. It doesn’t matter that it takes money to keep the lights on, mow the lawns and pay the staff. The money should just be there. That means they keep their cushy jobs. It also means they can focus solely on filling classrooms with people who will swallow their leftist dogma without question.

    “In most of the humanities and social sciences—especially the overtly political “Studies” fields—rigor has fallen completely into the abyss.” This phrasing presumes at one time rigor DID exist in those fields. You might make a case the humanities did long ago, but the “studies fields” never had any.

    “That professor has now been replaced by a hybrid cheerleader/mental-health therapist/counselor/entertainment facilitator/social worker/pseudo-parent/friend and confidante.” Not me and not in my STEM classes. I inform students I am not to be addressed by my first name. There is no partial credit or extra credit. Grades are assigned on a strict point scale. All assignments have due dates and late assignments are not accepted.

  2. “His recipe was for colleges and universities to fully embrace methods such as test-optional admissions to admit students who could not otherwise make the grade”

    UMass Amherst tried something similar in the early 1990s in a desperate attempt to find warm bodies — they simply lowered the admissions standards outright. This quickly led to a freshman attrition rate in excess of 50% — over half the freshman class not being there the following fall (for a variety of reasons including transferring elsewhere).

    Above and beyond the mere issue of freshman retention, lowering academic standards (however done) leads to the need to teach at these lower standards and that means that those students who met the earlier (higher) standards are bored out of their minds. You can assign a lot of sophomoric busywork (often confused for academic rigor) but half the students will recognize it for what it is (and resent it) while the other half won’t be able to do it in the first place.

    This inexorably leads to problems with alcohol and drugs as bored students inevitably find ways to entertain themselves. It also isn’t long before the changes on campus become known to the larger world — and your freshman attrition rate explodes for a variety of reasons.

    What happened at UMass was the Commonwealth stepping in and setting minimum admissions standards — which UMass proceeded to find end runs around, but that is another story.

    My point is that there is no need to make the SAT/ACT optional in order to lower admissions standards as the institution can just decide to do that — the advantage of having these tests optional is that the applicants with low scores won’t include them and hence it becomes far more difficult for outsiders to prove that the admissions standards have been lowered.

    The question I have is how many institutions already have de-facto open admissions….

  3. “Conley focused on the demographics (in short, Americans are producing many fewer children) and the drop in demand for higher education.”

    There is more to it than this — ever since the Civil War, we have had small and large generations (the latter when the guys came home from the war). There were very few children born between 1929 and 1945 because of first the Depression and then the war.

    The Baby Boomers were (largely) born between 1948 and 1960, and while they aged out of college in the early 1980s, the older Baby Boomer women who had gotten married instead of going to college in the ’70s were recruited to fill the empty seats. But by 1990 they also had graduated and some of us remember the lean years of the 1990s.

    Remember that Gen X was a much smaller generation — these were the children of those who had been born 1929-1945.

    The Millenials were the children of the Baby Boomers — except that they came from families of 1-2 children rather than 3-5 children, and they were all born in the late ’80s. So they all turned 18 in the early ’00s…

    The current generation of college students are the children of Gen X (and grandchildren of the children of the depression) — a much smaller generation, and (like the Millennials) they are also coming from families of 1-2 children. And then (like in 1929), a lot of families decided not to have children in 2008 when the economy tanked, and that birth rate is only now starting to recover.

    So in 2026 the children not born in 2008 won’t be turning 18 and the demographic decline will become a sheer cliff. There simply will not be enough warm bodies to fill all the seats in higher education…

    I have been writing about this for a couple decades now — when every college in the country was expanding in the “oughts”, borrowing money to build fancy new buildings, I was warning that the demographic increase was only temporary and that the then-current birth rates indicated the coming demographic decline.

    After 2008, I wasn’t the only person doing this — and some of them were far more famous than I. In 2018, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen predicted that 50% of colleges and universities will close or go bankrupt in the next decade — and that was before Covid.

    Hence how are people surprised now about the demographic issue?

    I think that the problems facing higher education are far deeper than this, but no one should be surprised that babies not born 18 years ago aren’t turning 18 now….

  4. “But at the same time enrollment in four-year institutions is falling, two-year colleges and skilled trade programs are experiencing growth. Evidence suggests that potential students and their parents are working carefully through the math, comparing the cost of education to the eventual pay rates of graduates. Many are changing course on where to invest their education dollars.”

    This is nonsense. The link says just the opposite about CC enrollments. In fact, the CC’s have been hit horribly, starting with the Great Recession. This writer is just making up fiction to fit his own prejudices.

    1. May I suggest you take a look at the current controversy over Voke Tech high schools in Massachusetts? Seems that so many “college bound” students are electing to attend them that their admissions standards have become quite selective.

    2. The problem is that there neither is a uniform definition of what constitutes a community college, nor are they all similar. (Most are quite dissimilar internally as well.)

      In general, there are four missions of a community college — (a) college prep and/or Associate’s (2-year) Degree programs (often transferable to a 4-year degree, (b) trade preparation (e.g. electrician, plumber) including the required continuing education for those already in the field, (c) basic skills normally taught in K-12, and (d) enrichment.

      Even within the formal AB programs there is diversity ranging from — well — dental hygienist certification to women’s studies — the former leading directly to a job that pays $45/hour and the latter not. And then there is the reputation of the individual institution — for some things, I’d consider Springfield Technical Community College far superior to UMass Amherst, the state’s flagship university.

      Hence the problem with quantitative research — both you and Riley can both be correct because it is entirely possible for some aspects of the community colleges to be doing quite well and for others to be doing quite badly. To explain how quantitative research can obfuscate this, I’d not only have to discuss mean, median, mode, outliers, and variance but also the advantage of qualitative research — and I don’t really want to right now.

      But look at it this way: Suzie got an A and two Ds — which gives her a GPA of 1.5 even though she *did* get that A.

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