“This student, like many others, isn’t just responding to an immediate economic calculation. He’s also caught in an invisible (and increasingly visible) demographic force: America is running out of people his age. Even if colleges fixed their cost and value proposition tomorrow — even if tuition dropped and job prospects improved — there would still be fewer students like him to fill seats. We are hitting peak 18-year-old, and the decline is just beginning.”
I my town, we just had the peak graduating class in terms of number of students. From this point forward, at least as far as we have data on (which would be around 4 or 5 year olds entering the school system) there will be fewer people graduating every single year.
Our number of 18 year olds has peaked