What Happens to College Towns After Peak 18-Year-Old?

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

measurablefunc

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56 comments

theargumentmag.comOtherstory

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DemographicsCollege TownsUrban Planning

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Demographics

College Towns

Urban Planning

The article examines the challenges faced by college towns after the peak number of 18-year-old students, sparking a discussion on the impact of demographic changes on local economies and communities.

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Oct 10, 2025 at 9:48 PM EDT
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Discussion (56 comments)

Showing 45 comments of 56

toomuchtodo

3 months ago

4 replies

> But here’s the most telling data point from the school’s National Student Clearinghouse data: Over 60% of WKU-admitted applicants who don’t attend WKY don’t enroll anywhere. Not at a competitor, not at a community college — nowhere. Colleges are still competing with one another, but increasingly, they’re competing with the labor market itself.

Labor shortages are leading to college credentials not being needed. This is objectively good (as college debt and the time opportunity cost is avoided for an unnecessary credential), and hopefully will continue as demographic dynamics continue in the US. Is it good or bad the US has many colleges that will close because they are no longer needed due to a slowly declining fertility rate? It just is.

wrp

3 months ago

7 replies

They won't close. They will just rely more heavily on foreign students. The primary focus of academia is to remain employed, not to serve the needs of the domestic student population.

jeremyjh

3 months ago

2 replies

Is there any profession where they aren't focused on staying employed?

readthenotes1

3 months ago

2 replies

You mean, is there any state funded system in which the primary drive of the system is to elrotect and expand itself, even at the expense of providing the good ir service for which it was created?

History says no...

stouset

3 months ago

1 reply

You can literally just strike the words “state funded” from your sentence. If you don’t think companies function exactly this way, I’m not sure what to tell you.

And in a world where every competitor in a given market is owned by one of two or three megaconglomerates, “voting with your feet” stopped mattering long ago.

terminalshort

3 months ago

1 reply

For one thing, very few markets are like that, and even then they face the threat of new entrants if they suck. e.g. the cab companies that got blown out by Uber. You are right that they fundamentally operate the same way as state funded entities, but having a revenue stream that is completely divorced from providing economic value allows the institution to keep its doors open at levels of rot 10x that which it takes to kill a megacorp.

collingreen

3 months ago

Uber had to break a lot of laws and grease a lot of palms to do what they did and they still lose mountains of investor money every quarter (almost every? When they aren't liquidating regional divisions and calling those wins).

I don't think we want a system together where the way to make it work is to cheat and increase corruption. Maybe there are better examples of good ol' fashioned honest companies just plan ol' out competing entrenched incumbents without cheating or lying or hurting the public.

JadeNB

3 months ago

> You mean, is there any state funded system in which the primary drive of the system is to elrotect and expand itself, even at the expense of providing the good ir service for which it was created?

> History says no...

Aside from the obvious typos, I think that there is a crucial 'not' missing in the first sentence.

Also, why single out state funded systems? I don't believe that private enterprises have been a great model for provision of goods or services over self enrichment. (I now see that stouset said the same hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546268.)

wrp

3 months ago

1 reply

In medicine and law, it is unethical and sometimes illegal to choose your course of action based on profitability against the needs of the client. Teaching has been traditionally been held to the same ethical standard.

alwa

3 months ago

And to their credit, a healthy chunk of those practitioners seem to hold true to their oaths. The swelling ranks of administrators “optimizing their productivity” for the shareholders, on the other hand…

jgsser

3 months ago

1 reply

There are people who will read this, agree with this, and still not realise how absolutely fucked everything is.

toomuchtodo

3 months ago

I can believe that higher education is vital to an educated, critical thinking electorate (as well as developing well rounded citizens) while also believing that the current US college system is highly dysfunctional, trapping people in non dischargeable student loan debt for little lifetime wage premium or increased employment opportunity. I fully support community colleges, for example, as efficient education infrastructure. I have no degree credential, I am a high school dropout, but have used community colleges to learn (welding and fabrication skills) and was offered a job right after receiving certifications for those blue collar classes.

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” The current system sucks, and improvement is needed.

terminalshort

3 months ago

4 replies

This only works for exclusive, high prestige schools. Not many rich foreigners are going to pay full freight to send their kids to Western Kentucky University.

Calavar

3 months ago

1 reply

America itself and the opportunity to get your foot in the door with a student visa is the prestige factor for many students - the prestige of the university is secondary. That allows a lit of third tier universities to fill their master's programs with international students

jeremyjh

3 months ago

1 reply

Those days are over with the current administration.

Herring

3 months ago

Not to worry, China will pick up the torch. They just came up with a new H1B style visa.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg4eeerzrwo

olyjohn

3 months ago

The community college I used to work at made its bread and butter from foreign students. Super mega rich parents sent their kids there. Many of them drove expensive cars. Community colleges in the US are actually highly regarded in a lot of places overseas, believe it or not. And this wasn't in some big city either. It was in kind of a town that isn't very well known for being a safe place to walk around at night.

gyomu

3 months ago

Rich foreigners will send their kids to big name schools, and WKU will adapt their pricing to get the kids of middle class foreigners.

relaxing

3 months ago

There’s no shortage of rich foreigners with failsons who can’t get into Prestige U.

toomuchtodo

3 months ago

Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503960 - October 2025

U.S. colleges poised to close in next decade, expert says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171434 - September 2025

Looming 'demographic cliff': Fewer college students and fewer graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42634596 - January 2025

Predicting College Closures and Financial Distress [pdf] - https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-... - December 2024

BestColleges: Tracking College Closures and Mergers - https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/closed-colleges-list-s...

(At least 84 public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers since March 2020 as of this comment; I think the evidence is strong smaller for profit schools with enrollments <1k will continue to close well into the future)

nradov

3 months ago

Third-tier private colleges are already shutting down. In the past few years some examples include Holy Names University, Iowa Wesleyan University, Marymount California University, San Francisco Art Institute, Wells College, and the list goes on. Colleges with minimal name recognition have no ability to attract foreign students.

sbmthakur

3 months ago

The supply of foreign students does depends on their career prospects in the US(which is getting worse at least in tech) and also the current administration is weighing policies that would cap intake of foreign students.

https://thebusinessfrontier.com/trump-tells-universities-to-...

dhosek

3 months ago

The current administration is directly and indirectly eliminating the foreign student pipeline. Even if we somehow get out of this morass in the next few years, which is far from guaranteed, the long-term damage will take decades to repair if ever.

The foreign student population, incidentally, had been a big subsidizer of the domestic student population. They pay full tuition and get no domestic financial aid. But that flow is getting shut off, and between the domestic cliff and this self-inflicted international cliff, they will close. A lot of smaller liberal arts colleges have shut down in the last decades and we’re busily working to send the destruction up the food chain.

terminalshort

3 months ago

1 reply

And the best part is that even when the labor shortage ends, the myth that the credential was ever necessary is permanently broken.

wakawaka28

3 months ago

1 reply

Lol fat chance. Credentials are necessary for advanced civilization. They exist to facilitate the cooperation of strangers. Do you want to deal with uncredentialed doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, finance managers, etc.? It is a quite idiotic that you need credentials to be a plumber but not a software engineer. Thankfully there is a strong preference for credentials. But the ridiculous calls for no credentials at all (led by those who don't have them) echo throughout forums like this on a regular basis.

terminalshort

3 months ago

I have dealt with lawyers plenty, and I choose them by reputation and referral, not credential. I neither know nor care where any of them went to law school. Lawyers used to train by apprentice rather than school and it would be just fine if they did today too. Same with doctors. They still do train by apprentice, it's just called "residency." And similar to lawyers, I neither know nor care where they went to med school. And although every doctor I have ever seen has the proper credentials, I have never seen a profession where incompetence abounds quite like the medical one. As for engineers, I am an uncredentialed engineer, so... And just like lawyers, I have hired plenty, and the best way to hire engineers is also by referral, not by credential.

bruce511

3 months ago

It's easy to point at any one thing and make that the cause. More likely though it's a combination of things all working together.

Yes, the labor market is changing. As the economy changes from industrial to services, so demands for some jobs go up, others go down. The emphasis on automation (AI being just another card in that deck) means that more is produced, while employing ever fewer people.

100 years ago agriculture consumed 27% of the work force. Today its 1%, while at the same time production is much higher.

The explosion of student debt, the access to knowledge online (outside of a college course), the declining birth rate, the current hostility to foreign students, the poor image of the US abroad, all contribute though. Each factor is small in isolation, but together they're moving the needle.

The saturation of the professional class also plays a role. Do we need to churn out several thousand new architects every year? Especially into a society that sees the concept of architecture as irrelevant?

Yes, colleges will close. The demand caused by the boomers will go away. But that's part of a much bigger shift in US society.

someothherguyy

3 months ago

i think that is a good goal, as long as during primary and secondary education, schools pick up the deficit one would miss not attending tertiary program, which, at the moment they are not even close to, with forced route memorization, dogmatic learning style, and so much more that many people lament having been forced though only to discover better ways of learning at the tertiary level.

i don't think anyone cares anymore though. its just win and grin.

renewiltord

3 months ago

1 reply

Universities are responding by increasing the range of people they admit. If you consider universities farmers growing a crop of students that the government pays for, you'll see things play out like this.

You think to yourself "why would they admit people with really low scores and then inflate grades? That doesn't seem like educating people" but the answer is that they're responding to a crop with shrinking yield by expanding what they're willing to farm.

Hence all those bogus subjects and stuff which people are getting degrees in.

terminalshort

3 months ago

Classic case of short term vs long term incentives. Dumbing down the schools results in both an increase in enrollment due to the increase in eligible candidates and a decrease in enrollment due to decreasing the value of the credential. But the former is instant, and the latter takes a long time to develop as it takes quite a while for the reputation to catch up with reality on the ground.

So the university system has spent the last several decades basically consuming its most valuable asset (exclusivity) for short term growth. And it worked. For a while, at least. But now the long term effects are catching up with them and it has become apparent that the strategy is actually a doom loop:

lower standards to raise enrollment -> reduce value of credential -> less students enroll -> lower standards to raise enrollment

fred_is_fred

3 months ago

1 reply

If colleges that don't produce economic return for their students close that's bad for the town, but overall good for the students and the US as a whole.

wakawaka28

3 months ago

It's not that simple. Students don't really choose colleges based 100% on their outcomes. They choose based on cost, curricula offerings, luxury factors, brand recognition, and so on. Many of the colleges that close in the future will probably be perfectly good ones with good value that just become increasingly less attractive as they are forced to take less students and cut staff over time. Less choices is not good for the US as a whole. It means that the average American will have to travel farther from home to go to college to study what they want to study.

rckt

3 months ago

2 replies

Seems like all the developed countries face the same issue - people there feel insecure and are scared to make important decisions, like they choose to have a dog instead of a family/child. What puzzles me is why all these countries actively do nothing about it.

pirates

3 months ago

1 reply

Deciding whether or not to have children IS the important decision, it’s not a given that everybody wants children. We’re not “afraid”, fucking lol

rckt

3 months ago

Personal preference is one thing, statistics is the other. Spain for example has twice as much dogs as children. I guess it’s just a very pet loving nation. Nothing to do with the economy.

arrosenberg

3 months ago

Because the oligarchs who own the media and the politicians don’t care about the petty lives of regular people.

cheschire

3 months ago

2 replies

So... off to the trades then?

beachtaxidriver

3 months ago

1 reply

Maybe. But last I checked the trades pay horrible and destroy your body by 40.

Every story of the trades pay well is just "be a trades business owner" well okay, but basically every alternative "be a X business owner" pays better.

tayo42

3 months ago

2 replies

Plumbers charge like 200/hr if you get to the point where you work for yourself that seems pretty good?

burnt-resistor

3 months ago

1 reply

Until you slip a disc around C6, or your back or knees give out.

While "dirty hands == clean money", the problem is that it often ends in sacrifice in health and/or body that leads to involuntary early retirement.

My dad had an A/C and electrical automotive specialty shop until 1985 when that took him out in his mid 30's. He also had Agent Orange exposure in the military and exposure to various carcinogens with a culture of PPE avoidance in the automotive industry of the 70's and 80's.

wakawaka28

3 months ago

I think your dad's experience is in the minority. You could usually do that kind of work until at least your 50s. What people in his position often do is take office jobs in adjacent fields. For example, if you were a mechanic but can't work that anymore, you could work in customer service or sales since you know something about the business. If you really stick it out till your 40s and beyond, management or entrepreneurship might be more appropriate. But that isn't for everyone.

UncleMeat

3 months ago

If you own your own business and can ensure enough clients you can make good money. But this isn't exactly a default situation. And it comes with all of the associated overhead for owning your own business. If you are a one-person show you'll also need to be available at weird times for emergencies or will lose clients because you aren't available on a weekend to deal with some issue.

Plenty of people working in the trades are making modest salaries working for some builder or some company that serves industrial clients.

fzeroracer

3 months ago

There's a lot of trades that won't hire someone without a basic degree. This is because the hollowing of our educational systems isn't just at a college level, people graduating out of highschool are increasingly illiterate and trade jobs require a basic degree of literacy to function.

We're really badly setup for the future from multiple aspects.

w10-1

3 months ago

Demographics aside, administrators have no real incentive to make their product better. The whole system will be fairer if they can't depend on social fictions for their reputation and marketing.

godsinhisheaven

3 months ago

How many (public and private) colleges does the United States even need? 100, maybe? 50? 25? I think too many people have been going to college over the past, oh, 40 years or so, and part of that is because we have so many freaking colleges and universities. We don't need so many. There are so many jobs out there that do not require a degree, and even more that should not require a degree.

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