The College Enrollment Crisis

Audio Editing by Donovan Bullen
Motion Graphics by Vincent de Langen
Writing, Thumbnail Design, and Direction by Evan

This includes a paid sponsorship which had no part in the writing, editing, or production of the rest of the video.

With video from Getty Images
With video from Reuters
With maps provided by MapTiler/OpenStreetMap Contributors and GEOlayers 3

[spartan]

Everyone is freaking out about crashing birth rates but will do absolutely nothing to encourage people to have children. When both parents have to work at a full time job a piece, with no real way to save for retirement how could they possibly anticipate having children?

[marsalisvince]

I remember when Scott Galloway said, “Any university that doesn’t grow their freshman class faster than population, that has over a billion dollars in endowments, should lose their tax free-status because they’re no longer in higher education, they’re a hedge fund offering classes.” That’s a trend that follows the “seller”
universities. My alma mater, Georgia Tech had a 16.46% acceptance rate but is doing increasingly well as time passes with +4 billion dollars in endowments each year and classes overrun by demand without much supply because it attracts so many applicants.

[mythos]

This was something that my career counselor had explained to me when I told him I had interest in becoming a professor. He told me if something didn’t change, a significant portion of the colleges would shut down.

[natekloepfer]

It never ceases to surprise me how the reverberations of the 2008 recession still are present today.

[Cameron-hsry]

My dads a professor and always talks about the lack of proper incentive structures in academia. He could be the worst teacher ever, never show up to class, but as long as he writes books and does research he'd get larger raises/promotions than a professor that focused on actually teaching the students that enroll in his courses. Theres no incentive in University to actually teach the students that pay an arm & a leg to enroll their and pay everyone's salaries.

[RichardDong]

If a college degree actually guaranteed a job and you never had to hear "eXpErIeNcE rEqUiReD", I'm sure colleges would still be afloat.

[fzigunov]

You're completely missing that internationals are no longer coming because they are not finding schooling in the US is a venue for immigration anymore. We definitely experience that in our school.

[WyomingGuy]

Cover the ever increasing body count of 'administrators'. Colleges and universities have corporate employee bloat.

[TheSquirrelChaser]

Higher education is too expensive, and with most graduates never getting a job in their field of study, it's too risky for most.

[danielsanchez]

I remember visiting my sister's college (private university) a few years back. She gave me a tour of the massive campus, which included multiple very large gyms, a bunch of swimming pools, and quite a bit of other amenities that had little to do with education - and they were still building new amenities! I was just shocked at how much of her tuition money didn't go toward education.

[crashdavis]

it's absolutely insane that so many people are touting the line 'college campus buildings are so expensive to run'. I worked for the maintenance department of my stem college and the neglect was insane. They mismanaged that place so, so, so strongly. For instance, they would build 5 new buildings, not hire ANY extra maintenance personnel, quote 'costs' of hiring, then approve EVERY EMPLOYEE in the maintenance department to write (up to 5k) checks for any work they 'can't get done' to an outside contractor. NO HIGHERS UPS APPROVAL NECESSARY. Absolutely braindead decision. Unbelievably stupid.

Imagine charging 1000$ a month or more, two or three kids to a room, and claiming 'we just can't make this

Something else is going on people, wake up.

[TheAgentOfDeath]

Maybe it’s because many of my college friends are still underemployed, working in fields that don’t even require a degree, simply because we didn’t have years of experience before graduating. On top of that, job postings often have unrealistic expectations, offering poor pay for entry-level roles despite demanding extensive experience, skills, and education.

[Zones]

Every year seems more and more hopeless for the youth of tomorrow. Pretty sad honestly.

[EvilMonkey]

Many private universities force students to live on campus for their first two years. The headline is for "the college life experience" but I suspect it's primarily $$$. Most dorms are more crowded than the projects in the ghetto, and each student is paying $2-3K per month. Oh food is included? Yeah, Fall semester of freshman year everyone's eating in the cafeteria. On weekends the cafeteria is dead even in the fall. By spring semester the cafeterias are way less crowded, students often eat elsewhere. Sophomore year - the average on campus student eats less than 1 meal a day in the cafeteria. So they're paying $2-3K to share a 200 sq ft room with someone, eating 10- 20 meals a month of cafeteria food. A slumlord landlord could make money hand over fist with such conditions.

[McClainJ]

The fact that colleges teach economics, but can't seem to prepare for such a situation, is probably a sign that they shouldn't be teaching economics.

[MrHeavy]

So universities have off-loaded the "painful soul searching" off to students and their families every time economic hardships occur. Gotcha.

[Calebicus]

I live in Birmingham and can give some context to Birmingham-Southern's closure.

The school had struggled for several years and most students going there knew that a closure could happen at any time. No one was surprised that it happened, but no one knew it would be 2024. It almost happened a year earlier, but funding was secured to stay open for at least one more year. There had also been years of poor financial management and the college began using its endowment for operating expenses, practically sealing its fate. At the very end, the college tried to get an emergency loan from the State using a law passed exactly for this situation, but the State Treasurer refused. The school was a money pit with no prospects and no viable way to ever increase revenue as high as the school needed.

On top of all this, there are several factors at play that contributed to its eventual downfall. The college is located in a "bad" part of town in relation to the rest of the city. The college itself was quite safe, but getting to/from it would trouble many parents. The college itself is a liberal arts institution, which would garner a small student body population. Why go to Birmingham-Southern when you can go to Alabama, Auburn, UAB, or UAH? All of these are larger schools that have specializations in business/law, engineering, medicine, and engineering, respectively. The college didn't have enough prestige to get a student body large enough to match its expenses.

No one knows what will happen to the campus. It seems like a waste to tear it all down since the buildings are perfectly serviceable, but these buildings are all built to serve a large education institution. They don't convert easily into apartments or offices and it's difficult to sell part of the campus and not the rest. Ideally, it would be good for another college to set up shop in the space, but for the reasons listed above that is unlikely. Perhaps some other very large corporation could come in and be able to make use of the campus, but Birmingham isn't attracting such large commercial institutions either.

I suspect the college will sit there for 20 years or so, and after the buildings are so unmaintained that tearing them down will be worth it, then the campus will be bulldozed down to empty land and sold off in lots. A sad end to an historical institution.

[jordanthielman]

Thers a giant elephant in the room on costs of tuition which was not addressed in the video and that is federal student loans.

[KingArthurWs]

The University of Chicago, one of the top 10 colleges in the country with an endowment of 14 billion$, is actually in a huge crisis right now and are losing 500 million $ a year. Most of that 14 billion is tied up in specific destinations within the school, and so their liquidity is actually extremely limited, and as a consequence, their credit outlook is negative. Pretty horrifying stuff; even these "sellers" can face really bad financials.

[joshnabours]

It is almost like our culture's total lack of care for the classics (morals, ethics, scholarly studies, etc) and "above all else" prioritization of profit, money and efficiency, has turned colleges from the pinnacle of our culture into paid adult daycare with a built in self study program.