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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can someone explain to me why people are saying that college applicants are declining but in other threads people are talking about a demographic bubble that won’t start decreasing until 2026 or so?  Which is it?[/quote]

Colleges have 1MM fewer students today vs 2013.  You can easily Google that.

[b]This is primarily due to fewer HS grads attending due to cost and seeing so many underemployed college grads.[/b]  The demographic decline I think technically starts with the class of 2025 and the accelerates with the classes of 2026+.  A byproduct of the Great Recession of 2008 and beyond.

The number of applications per kid has spike due to the common app and the internet making it easier to apply.  So there is a divergence between number of applicants and total applications.

However, all these extra applications are going to top 100 schools for the most part.

In the case of WVU, I believe the school has dropped from 29,000 students to 21,000 (from the article).  WVU falls into the 3900 schools that will see reduced demand unless they do something drastic like make it free for instate…copy what GA and FL are doing with scholarships.  Problem is the state of WV doesn’t have the resources of FL or GA.[/quote]

Evidence for this claim?  [/quote]

Maybe get off your a** and perhaps read any number of articles on the topic.  If it makes you feel any better in the WSJ article specfic to UWV they quote the following:

"Meanwhile, the population of West Virginia high-school graduates fell, and the share of students proceeding directly to college dropped from 55% in 2011 to 46% for the class of 2022."

Also, there is this:

"With a hot job market, more are deciding not to pursue higher education. This spring of 2023, there were 14.2 million undergraduates in the U.S., which is about 9% fewer than were enrolled in spring 2019, according to research out this week from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center."

Also this:

"The first couple of generations to go through using primarily the student loan system was more of an experiment," Stephanie Hall, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told Insider.

"I think younger generations have seen the impact of that debt on the older generations, especially as some of us have navigated more than one inflationary or recessionary period," Hall said. "So that's certainly impacting students' college-going habits."[/quote]

Those are all claims individual people are making about causes of shifts in college enrollment--not data about a causal relationship.   Typically in low unemployment periods college enrollment goes down--this has been historically true.  The pandemic also made students less college-ready than before--both academically and in terms of general mental health.  We also had years of restricted immigration and more restrictive policies on international students since 2016 and then even more during the pandemic, which had previously been a growing source of college enrollment.  I actually read a lot about this issue, and it's not anywhere as simple as you are claiming.[/quote]

I am not claiming anything...I am quoting sources that have spent time researching the issue.  I guess we just have to take your word for it that you are an expert on the issue.[/quote]

You made a causal claim about the drop in enrollment:

"This is primarily due to fewer HS grads attending due to [b]cost[/b] and [b]seeing so many underemployed college grads[/b]."

So I was asking if you had evidence for that causal claim-- because I've read a lot of studies and haven't seen that evidence.  Quotes from other people who sort of think similar things don't work for me without a link to the study that supported it (I mean, sure, it's a no-brainer that cost IMPACTS college attendance, but is that a primary cause of the decline in enrollment since 2013? That's occurring after the time period when college costs had their most rapid rise---they have risen a lot less between 2010 and 2022 than in earlier decades).   And I don't see any of your evidence talking about a) whether there are more underemployed college grads in this time period and b)whether HS grads are paying attention to that.
I wasn't being snarky--I wanted to know if you had evidence for that claim.  Because honestly I don't think researchers really have a handle on what is impacting college enrollment trends--there's a lot of contradictory information.[/quote]

I mean WTF do you want?  This is DCUM not the internal board for the National Association of Economists.  I quoted legitimate 3rd party sources and you simply responded with comments that emanate from your posterior.[/quote]

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