That higher education institutions are facing a “demographic cliff” in the coming years has become conventional wisdom.
But what if there is no cliff? What if we’ve instead been subjected to a narrative rooted in limited data that serves the interests of corporations and is doing real damage to our public institutions?
Advanced by Nathan Grawe in his 2018 book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, this thesis claims that because of demographic changes, the number of prospective college-going students will decrease, leading to significant drops in higher education enrollments. Grawe builds on the work of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education (WICHE), which has projected fewer future high school graduates for many years. In 2019, The Chronicle of Higher Education followed with “The Looming Enrollment Crisis,” which claimed that “the pool of likely students is expected to become much smaller and more racially diverse.”
Grawe’s thesis is about demographics, and his model includes variables based on federal data sets. He states that as he “looked for better data,” the “best” data he could find were the forecasts of high school graduates by WICHE. Yet he doesn’t include the most relevant federal data—the annual projections of educational statistics published by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Since 1964, the federal government has regularly published these projections to inform policy makers and the public about educational trends in both K-12 and higher education.
Currently, the NCES projects relatively constant numbers of high school graduates through 2030, with total graduates expected to increase in the mid-2020s, followed by a modest decline, making the projected 2029–30 number slightly greater than in 2016–17. Further, it is important to note that since the 1970s, the total number of high school graduates in the U.S. has declined several times before. More importantly for higher education, the NCES projects modest increases in higher education enrollments through 2029.
Federal projections from NCES of high school graduates—which have been limited to roughly eight years—have been more accurate than WICHE’s, which go as far as 17 years out. In 2003, WICHE projected fewer than 3.2 million high school graduates for 2017–18. In 2008, the first year that federal data reached 2017–18, the NCES projected over 3.3 million high school graduates that year. Current federal estimates show that well over 3.6 million students graduated high school in 2017–18, making federal long-term estimates more accurate than WICHE’s (although both originally underprojected). Current federal data also show that 2013 federal projections for 2021–22 were also much more accurate than WICHE’s March 2008 projections for the same year (with both underprojecting again).
WICHE has also erred in its more recent, immediate-term projections and in 2020 had to acknowledge that its 2016 projections significantly underestimated the number of graduates for the following year. The NCES projections again turned out to be more accurate. As if to set the record straight, in its 2020 projections, WICHE stated that the coming cliff was actually a “modest decline.”
While WICHE seeks to “support informed policy making” with “unbiased, objective research,” it has multiple conflicts of interest. It has dozens of corporate partners and funders that benefit directly from promoting future enrollment crises and the many products designed to fix them, including online education and various data analytic services. In 1989, WICHE created WCET—the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies—solely to promote the use of increased technology in higher education.
Moreover, WICHE is an interest group with an explicit policy agenda—“focus areas”—which includes “developing and supporting innovations in technology and beyond that improve the quality of postsecondary education and reduce costs.”
Grawe’s influential book is hyperbolic throughout. He states that “everyone in higher education agrees that dramatic shifts in demand lie ahead,” which is false. “Little time remains” to sort out the dramatic changes in higher education demand Grawe now sees as roughly 10 years in the future. Inexplicably, he states that the “Great Recession did not simply delay births—it eliminated them” and posits a “near nationwide collapse of the non-Hispanic white population,” mischaracterizing Census projections.
The purported demographic crisis is being used around the country to fundamentally remake higher education. For example, this is the main argument being advanced by Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature seeking to radically reshape the University of Wisconsin system. This plan calls for the significant expansion of online education, regionalization of the comprehensive campuses, increased campus specialization and program consolidation and elimination, among other long-standing priorities. The report concludes that “If no action is taken now to address the looming demographic crisis and attendant decline in enrollment within the UW System, ultimately the result will be the closure of several comprehensive campuses.”
Let’s look at some Wisconsin population data. First, the state increased in population between 2010 and 2021, and official data estimate that 65 of 72 counties gained population during this period. Yes, reliable data from researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, project slight decreases in total K-12 enrollments statewide in the coming years. This is hardly a “looming demographic crisis,” particularly since many students do not enroll in higher education immediately after high school.
Further, in Wisconsin and across the country, the exact crisis mandating such extreme higher education policy changes keeps changing. In May 2020—at the very beginning of the pandemic—the Republican-controlled UW system published a plan to significantly expand online learning and increase campus specialization based on the “looming financial challenges” and “significant costs” of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the corporate-created, post-COVID framing that dominated higher education throughout 2020 and into 2021.
But the economic collapse never came. The state currently has low unemployment and a nearly $3 billion budget surplus. These realities required the creation of a “looming demographic crisis” to even attempt to impose this tremendously unpopular and unwise higher education policy agenda.
Grawe testified at the Republican hearings that produced the Wisconsin report. His recommendations echoed business talking points, including the suggestion that we ensure that “academic programming is relevant and students can see how their degrees will be useful after they graduate.”
The current context of higher education provides fertile ground for the uncritical acceptance of the demographic cliff. Higher education enrollments have declined since reaching historic highs in 2010. And decades of political decisions have made higher education tuition-driven, one state budget cycle at a time. We are vulnerable to the demographic cliff framing because of the politically imposed financial crunch in which we exist. Enrollments dictate everything we do.
In political terms, then, the demographic cliff is an austerity-driven narrative that assumes that public funding will never—and should never—come back. The cost of public higher education will be further placed on the backs of students, increasing student debt and making higher education even more tuition-dependent. Programs must be eliminated, online education must be expanded and, if necessary, even entire campuses must be closed. Higher education must be agile because tax increases are off the table, even as stock markets reach new highs and the income and wealth of the highest earners skyrockets. The interests of corporations and the wealthy will dictate public policy.
If higher education is truly data-driven, we must consider the issue of data sources. Federal and state agencies have a wealth of data at our disposal. Publications such as the Census and the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report provide the basis of our understanding of society. And official population and education data—which come with no political assumptions, narrative or products for sale—show a slowly increasing population, including higher education enrollments, in the coming years.
The demographic cliff is a manufactured crisis that simultaneously takes advantage of a tuition-dependent higher education system to implement even greater austerity while imposing an education policy agenda that could never be adopted through normal political means.
Neil Kraus is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. He is the author of Majoritarian Cities (2013, University of Michigan Press), Race, Neighborhoods, and Community Power (2000, SUNY Press), and several articles and book chapters on urban politics and policies, including education. He is completing a book on the politics of K-12 and higher education reform and the growth of economic inequality.
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