What if university executives manage to keep the status quo? Does higher ed stay on an even keel — steadily less loved and less funded, but still generating good volumes of decent credentials for people who will then mostly earn enough money to pay off their loans? The stoic demographer Nathan D. Grawe has written a book with a surprising answer. He takes no policy position, and I can picture him cringing at my impatient shorthanding of the current consensus. But his analysis rings an alarm that will sound very loud even to those with their fingers in their ears.
The consensus among today’s senior academic managers is that the most progressive ideas for universities must be defeated. Large-scale student debt relief? This college president opposes it. Free college at four-year institutions? This president opposes it. Divest the endowment from fossil fuel companies? This president opposes it. Eliminate special admissions for wealthy students? This president opposes it. On the other hand, hide a donation from an influential convicted pedophile? This president allows it. Reject a public university partnership with a for-profit diploma mill? This president created it. But make a trillion-dollar reinvestment in public universities? Where’s the president who has come out in favor of it?
In taking these stands, the presidents are setting themselves against public opinion. When a recent poll asked people if they support proposals to make “two and four year public and tribal colleges and universities tuition-free and debt-free and erase the roughly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt currently owed by close to 45 million Americans,” the answer was yes, 58 to 42 percent. This majority is important because the price tag of $2.2 trillion over 10 years was included in the question, and the policy won anyway. Seventy-two percent of Democrats favored the idea (which is good news for the presidential campaigns of its proposers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren); so did 58 percent of independents. In another poll, four-fifths of the public want federal and state governments to spend more money on higher education. College presidents are in danger of repeating their predecessors’ opposition to the 1944 GI Bill that built the modern public university system, such as University of Chicago’s president Robert Maynard Hutchins warning about “educational hoboes” who would burden colleges by living and studying at government expense.
Still, major reinvestment won’t happen if it faces opposition from higher-ed leadership en masse. Given the plans of Sanders, Warren, and others, the country might naturally ask the college presidents: if you say we can’t have zero tuition, or at least much lower tuition, or can’t end student debt, or can’t dial way back on private fundraising, or can’t greatly increase public funding, what can we do?
Higher ed’s Plan A is “you can have what you have now.” Meanwhile, its leaders will wait for free college and debt relief to die a political death while supporting more accountability metrics, simpler financial aid forms, higher income-eligibility thresholds, and calls for the next Secretary of Education to go back to prosecuting predatory for-profits. We are to have a set of dull yet virtuous tweaks, which add up, sort of. We would naturally assume that things at least won’t get worse — that graduation rates, debt levels, and racial imbalances would stay pretty much as they are now, which is mediocre by international standards, very unequal by race and income, yet mediocre and unequal in a settled, familiar way.
Enter Nathan Grawe, who has done the work to show us how wrong we are. He has built a Higher Education Demand Index (HEDI) to model the next 10 years, based on existing patterns. He looks at trends by region, by race and ethnicity, and by type of university, among other factors, so that he can avoid the banality of averages that wash out specific, intensive effects. He assumes that current patterns will stay unchanged, which is reasonable given the entrenched policy complacency within the sector itself. This is what he projects:
In addition, the highest population growth “is concentrated in populations that aren’t likely to attend a regional four-year school.” This is in part because the chances of a high school student finishing college are shockingly dependent on having parents that went to college, and regions with high rates of immigration or poverty are likely to have high shares of what would be first-generation college students — except they are less likely to attend. Polls at least in California suggest that Latinx parents have very high expectations for their children’s college attendance (closer to Asian Americans than to the lower white levels), but translating these desires into completion is easier said than done.
A third issue is that colleges aren’t going to get another major boost to enrollment from women entering the workforce or from “knowledge economy” demand for college graduates (driven by “skill-based technical change”). The former boost was a one-time event, though it will continue on the margins; the latter seems to have stalled and may be going into reverse, given the offshoring of so much medium- and even high-skill work — not to mention expanding automation.
Based on the current autopilot, Grawe’s model yields the following. The two-year colleges that both parties present as the hope of the working classes will experience “dramatically reduced enrollments” — down 15 percent over the decade in some places. In Grawe’s graveside deadpan, “the HEDI anticipates that enrollments among-non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks will plummet by 20 and 30 percent, respectively, while the number of Hispanic students is expected to grow by 10 percent.”
Regional four-year colleges should benefit from the decline of two-year enrollments, shouldn’t they? Actually, no. After some mid-2020s growth, birth-death contraction will set in, and four-year numbers will also drop everywhere except in the Pacific region, where over 10 years they will grow by less than one percent.
Grawe’s model forecasts widespread under-enrollment that will produce fiscal crises at many colleges in many regions at once. We should expect systemic stress and turmoil, which would include cascading college closures of the kind threatened at Hampshire College and already occurring elsewhere. Closures will be worse in the Snow Belt/Rust Belt but not confined there. Many endangered colleges will struggle to stay open by cutting payrolls, which is likely to mean staff and faculty layoffs. Colleges may try to avoid layoffs with further adjunctification of the teaching force — or may combine layoffs with adjunctification, sometimes with the same professors (“We have to deny you tenure, but we’ll be happy rehire you on a three-year contract”). Grawe projects a loss of 8,000 faculty positions at two-year colleges and a further 9,000 positions lost at regional four-year schools.
It’s hard to imagine this fading higher-ed sector having the power to uplift or transform society. It will keep cutting educational spending to keep some money in the bank. Enrollment and revenue losses will particularly affect the poorer colleges that provide the most social mobility. State government’s core interest, job readiness, will also be hit: “[U]nless something changes, we should not expect to meet goals for a more highly trained workforce.” This will tempt state government to cut again. (...)
Autopilot plus the smaller youth cohort isn’t a falling tide that lowers all boats. Boats will float and sink according to familiar patterns, only more so. Students with college-educated parents and high-income students will know where to apply and what to do to get in, as they do now. But they will be chased by elite colleges with relatively more available slots than they have now. Fewer of these students who can pay full tuition will go to regional public colleges, worsening both their finances and their academic levels. Educational gaps among graduates will increase: students with college-educated parents go to regional colleges at twice the rate of first-generation students, and at six times the rate at “national and elite” schools. In short, Grawe writes, “Overall attendance rates will lag behind projections for our economy’s needs, and large gaps across groups will persist or even grow.” All we need to do to get this less educated and more unequal world is to stay the course.
The consensus among today’s senior academic managers is that the most progressive ideas for universities must be defeated. Large-scale student debt relief? This college president opposes it. Free college at four-year institutions? This president opposes it. Divest the endowment from fossil fuel companies? This president opposes it. Eliminate special admissions for wealthy students? This president opposes it. On the other hand, hide a donation from an influential convicted pedophile? This president allows it. Reject a public university partnership with a for-profit diploma mill? This president created it. But make a trillion-dollar reinvestment in public universities? Where’s the president who has come out in favor of it?
In taking these stands, the presidents are setting themselves against public opinion. When a recent poll asked people if they support proposals to make “two and four year public and tribal colleges and universities tuition-free and debt-free and erase the roughly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt currently owed by close to 45 million Americans,” the answer was yes, 58 to 42 percent. This majority is important because the price tag of $2.2 trillion over 10 years was included in the question, and the policy won anyway. Seventy-two percent of Democrats favored the idea (which is good news for the presidential campaigns of its proposers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren); so did 58 percent of independents. In another poll, four-fifths of the public want federal and state governments to spend more money on higher education. College presidents are in danger of repeating their predecessors’ opposition to the 1944 GI Bill that built the modern public university system, such as University of Chicago’s president Robert Maynard Hutchins warning about “educational hoboes” who would burden colleges by living and studying at government expense.Still, major reinvestment won’t happen if it faces opposition from higher-ed leadership en masse. Given the plans of Sanders, Warren, and others, the country might naturally ask the college presidents: if you say we can’t have zero tuition, or at least much lower tuition, or can’t end student debt, or can’t dial way back on private fundraising, or can’t greatly increase public funding, what can we do?
Higher ed’s Plan A is “you can have what you have now.” Meanwhile, its leaders will wait for free college and debt relief to die a political death while supporting more accountability metrics, simpler financial aid forms, higher income-eligibility thresholds, and calls for the next Secretary of Education to go back to prosecuting predatory for-profits. We are to have a set of dull yet virtuous tweaks, which add up, sort of. We would naturally assume that things at least won’t get worse — that graduation rates, debt levels, and racial imbalances would stay pretty much as they are now, which is mediocre by international standards, very unequal by race and income, yet mediocre and unequal in a settled, familiar way.
Enter Nathan Grawe, who has done the work to show us how wrong we are. He has built a Higher Education Demand Index (HEDI) to model the next 10 years, based on existing patterns. He looks at trends by region, by race and ethnicity, and by type of university, among other factors, so that he can avoid the banality of averages that wash out specific, intensive effects. He assumes that current patterns will stay unchanged, which is reasonable given the entrenched policy complacency within the sector itself. This is what he projects:
The US population will continue to shift from snowbelt to sunbelt — from Northeast and Midwest to West, Southwest, and South. The populations in the faster-growing areas will also tend to have a higher birth rate than the national average. The shift won’t in itself be a big deal for overall college completion — the students who don’t go to college in Massachusetts would in theory be graduating in Arizona, so there would be no overall loss.But there are complications. “The nation’s total fertility rate has plummeted by more than 12 percent since 2007. And so, beginning in 2026 the number of native-born children reaching college age will begin a rapid decline.” Birth rates hit bottom in 2013, but there has been no meaningful recovery.
In addition, the highest population growth “is concentrated in populations that aren’t likely to attend a regional four-year school.” This is in part because the chances of a high school student finishing college are shockingly dependent on having parents that went to college, and regions with high rates of immigration or poverty are likely to have high shares of what would be first-generation college students — except they are less likely to attend. Polls at least in California suggest that Latinx parents have very high expectations for their children’s college attendance (closer to Asian Americans than to the lower white levels), but translating these desires into completion is easier said than done.
A third issue is that colleges aren’t going to get another major boost to enrollment from women entering the workforce or from “knowledge economy” demand for college graduates (driven by “skill-based technical change”). The former boost was a one-time event, though it will continue on the margins; the latter seems to have stalled and may be going into reverse, given the offshoring of so much medium- and even high-skill work — not to mention expanding automation.
Based on the current autopilot, Grawe’s model yields the following. The two-year colleges that both parties present as the hope of the working classes will experience “dramatically reduced enrollments” — down 15 percent over the decade in some places. In Grawe’s graveside deadpan, “the HEDI anticipates that enrollments among-non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks will plummet by 20 and 30 percent, respectively, while the number of Hispanic students is expected to grow by 10 percent.”
Regional four-year colleges should benefit from the decline of two-year enrollments, shouldn’t they? Actually, no. After some mid-2020s growth, birth-death contraction will set in, and four-year numbers will also drop everywhere except in the Pacific region, where over 10 years they will grow by less than one percent.
Grawe’s model forecasts widespread under-enrollment that will produce fiscal crises at many colleges in many regions at once. We should expect systemic stress and turmoil, which would include cascading college closures of the kind threatened at Hampshire College and already occurring elsewhere. Closures will be worse in the Snow Belt/Rust Belt but not confined there. Many endangered colleges will struggle to stay open by cutting payrolls, which is likely to mean staff and faculty layoffs. Colleges may try to avoid layoffs with further adjunctification of the teaching force — or may combine layoffs with adjunctification, sometimes with the same professors (“We have to deny you tenure, but we’ll be happy rehire you on a three-year contract”). Grawe projects a loss of 8,000 faculty positions at two-year colleges and a further 9,000 positions lost at regional four-year schools.
It’s hard to imagine this fading higher-ed sector having the power to uplift or transform society. It will keep cutting educational spending to keep some money in the bank. Enrollment and revenue losses will particularly affect the poorer colleges that provide the most social mobility. State government’s core interest, job readiness, will also be hit: “[U]nless something changes, we should not expect to meet goals for a more highly trained workforce.” This will tempt state government to cut again. (...)
Autopilot plus the smaller youth cohort isn’t a falling tide that lowers all boats. Boats will float and sink according to familiar patterns, only more so. Students with college-educated parents and high-income students will know where to apply and what to do to get in, as they do now. But they will be chased by elite colleges with relatively more available slots than they have now. Fewer of these students who can pay full tuition will go to regional public colleges, worsening both their finances and their academic levels. Educational gaps among graduates will increase: students with college-educated parents go to regional colleges at twice the rate of first-generation students, and at six times the rate at “national and elite” schools. In short, Grawe writes, “Overall attendance rates will lag behind projections for our economy’s needs, and large gaps across groups will persist or even grow.” All we need to do to get this less educated and more unequal world is to stay the course.
