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In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich released The Population Bomb, confidently predicting that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” in the 1970s because human beings were reproducing too quickly. The book became campus gospel—assigned in sociology and environmental-studies courses as ironclad proof that humanity was on the brink of self-inflicted collapse.
The irony is now impossible to miss. Ehrlich’s apocalypse never materialized. Instead, the exact opposite crisis has arrived: a demographic collapse now hammering the very institutions that spent decades preaching the dangers of overpopulation. Higher education is staring into empty classrooms, cratering enrollments, and an existential question: whether thousands of campuses—and the jobs that go with them—will even exist a decade from now?
Things aren’t looking good. Last week, Higher Ed Dive warned that higher education faces a “deteriorating” 2026 outlook, with a shrinking student pipeline already shaking university finances. And in January, NPR announced that the long-predicted “demographic cliff” has finally arrived: the population of 18-year-olds—the lifeblood of college enrollment—began a steep, multi-year plunge this fall, driven in part by the collapse in U.S. birth rates after the 2007–08 recession.
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NPR is correct as far as it goes, but it stops short of the full story—an irony that stretches back to The Population Bomb itself. For decades, American higher education has not merely been a consumer of Ehrlich’s worldview but one of the nation’s most potent engines of anti-family sentiment. Since the 1960s, the academy has embraced and exported ideas—rooted in Marxism, radical feminism, and a deep suspicion of traditional family structures—that taught students to view marriage as constraining, motherhood as subjugation, and family life as an obstacle to self-fulfillment. As my colleague Nathaniel Urban and I noted in our recent essay “The Great Feminization Began With Education,” campus culture has long encouraged women to understand fulfillment primarily in careerist terms, leaving family formation as something to defer indefinitely. (For more on the campus-culture side of this, read my piece “College Students in a Romance Recession, Boys Blame ‘Hoeflation.’”)
But the ideological message wasn’t the only pressure working against family life—it was reinforced by the very economic conditions colleges and universities helped create. Decades of runaway tuition, inflated by institutions gorging on federal loan dollars, left graduates entering adulthood shackled with debt so heavy that many could barely afford housing, let alone children. And, not to go unmentioned, abortion, celebrated on campus for half a century as a liberating social good, erased roughly a quarter of the Gen Z cohort—millions of students who were never born. As the Apostle Paul puts it, “you reap what you sow.”
Taken together, the worldview and the material realities that higher education produced—anti-family ideology, career-first socialization, crippling debt, and the normalization of abortion—formed a single, continuous pipeline leading to one unmistakable outcome: fewer babies, fewer teenagers, and now fewer college students, leaving the colleges in a Darwinian fight for survival. And the fight to see who is fittest is already in full swing.
Admissions offices are racing to streamline applications: one-click applications, automatic acceptances for students who never applied, waived fees, even cash incentives just to get prospects on campus. Yet desperation alone won’t save them. Public trust in higher education is still at record lows, poisoned by years of ideological capture and the lingering stench of campus radicalism. Parents who have kids to send to college are increasingly asking why they should pay six-figure sums for four years of indoctrination when trade schools and YouTube deliver better outcomes at a fraction of the price.
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The casualties are mounting. NPR opened its demographic-cliff story with the liquidation of Iowa Wesleyan University, a 181-year-old institution shuttered in 2023 after bleeding enrollment and slashing tuition to fire-sale levels. Dozens of other small colleges have since merged or closed; more are teetering.
Some insist the coming scarcity of American students will finally force tuition down and make college more accessible. I’m not holding my breath. The institutions that survive the dearth—the flagship state schools, elite privates, and Ivies—will almost certainly keep prices sky-high by backfilling empty American seats with full-pay foreign students. With no serious policy from the Trump administration to curb foreign enrollment, remaining colleges and universities have every incentive to replace the missing children of the birth dearth with anyone from abroad who can write a big enough check.
And so here we are. The universities that preached a gospel of overpopulation are victims not of too many babies but of too few. They are choking down a hearty serving of crow—discovering too late that their business model required the children they spent decades convincing people not to have.
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