https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23428166/college-enrollment-population-education-crash

In 2021, Shippensburg University won the NCAA Division II Field Hockey championship, completing an undefeated season with a 3-0 victory over archrival West Chester. The “Ship” Raiders also won it all in 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2013, which I know because I saw it written in big letters on a banner festooning the fieldhouse on Ship’s campus in south-central Pennsylvania when I visited last month.

Ship was in fine form. Young men and women wearing logoed Champion sweatshirts bustled between buildings. There was a line at the coffee shop in the student union. It was the kind of bright-blue autumn day that you would see on a brochure.

There was no way to tell, from the outside, that Ship was a shrinking institution. Or that the problem is about to get a lot worse — not just here, but at colleges and universities nationwide.

In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”

Among the small number of elite colleges and research universities — think the Princetons and the Penn States — the cliff will be no big deal. These institutions have their pick of applicants and can easily keep classes full.

For everyone else, the consequences could be dire. In some places, the crisis has already begun. College enrollment began slowly receding after the millennial enrollment wave peaked in 2010, particularly in regions that were already experiencing below-average birth rates while simultaneously losing population to out-migration. Starved of students and the tuition revenue they bring, small private colleges in New England%20announced%20plans%20to%20close.) have begun to blink off the map. Regional public universities like Ship are enduring painful layoffs and consolidation.

The timing is terrible. Trade policy, de-unionization, corporate consolidation, and substance abuse have already ravaged countless communities, particularly in the post-industrial Northeast and Midwest. In many cases, colleges have been one of the only places that provide good jobs in their communities, offer educational opportunities for locals, and have strong enough roots to stay planted. The enrollment cliff means they might soon dry up and blow away.

This trend will accelerate the winner-take-all dynamic of geographic consolidation that is already upending American politics. College-educated Democrats will increasingly congregate in cities and coastal areas, leaving people without degrees in rural areas and towns. For students who attend less-selective colleges and universities near where they grew up — that is, most college students — the enrollment cliff means fewer options for going to college in person, or none at all.

The empty factories and abandoned shopping malls littering the American landscape may soon be joined by ghost colleges, victims of an existential struggle for reinvention, waged against a ticking clock of shrinking student bodies, coming soon to a town near you.

Ship was founded in 1871 as the Cumberland Valley State Normal School, to train young women to be school teachers. It became the State Teachers College in 1927, and stayed that way until something happened that would transform higher education and much else: the baby boom.

Some 4.3 million American children were born in 1957, a number that would not be matched for another 50 years, even as the overall population almost doubled to over 300 million.

The relationship between demography and higher education is always a two-decade delay of cause and effect. The college years of one generation fall in the birth years of the next. The baby boom meant that by the 1970s, campuses were bursting as the children of midcentury fecundity reached early adulthood and women increasingly sought degrees in professions that were finally opening up to women.

This put college leaders in a difficult spot. In the short term, they needed dorms and classrooms and teachers to handle the boomer wave. But birth rates had been declining for nearly 20 years, and they saw what that would mean for them in the near future. The talk then was much like today: Future enrollment trends looked bleak, and some colleges were already struggling.

But the 1980s enrollment cliff never really arrived. Higher education was saved by tectonic shifts in the labor market. As predicted, the number of high school graduates declined, from 3.1 million in 1976 to 2.5 million in 1994. But college enrollment rates actually increased, driven by deindustrialization and the collapse of well-paying blue-collar jobs. In 1975, the percentage of high school graduates who chose to immediately enroll in college was only 51 percent. By 1997, it was 67 percent.

Colleges found themselves in the extraordinarily lucky position of being the only places legally allowed to sell credentials that unlocked the gateway to a stable, prosperous life. That was enough to smooth out the bottom of the demographic trough until the children of the baby boom arrived.

And sure enough, the millennial college years began as expansionary times for places like Ship. From 1985 to 2007, the total number of undergraduates nationwide increased from 10.6 million to 15.6 million. And while birth numbers had been cycling back downward from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, they began to move up again in 2006 and 2007 as older millennials reached parenting age.

Then everything went to hell.