Scenes From the College Meltdown
12th May 2021
Partly because COVID led many graduating high school students to defer applying to college last year, this year’s college application numbers set a record. This may turn out to be a last hurrah for the old college model, however, as colleges are on the brink of a demographic cliff. The decline in the U.S. birth rate that accelerated during the housing finance crash of 2008 is expected to diminish the pool of college-bound students starting in the next few years. And if Democrats succeed in making community colleges and state colleges cheaper or free, how will private tuition-dependent colleges fare? Likely not well.