Yes, college enrollment, high school enrollment, and labor participation are all down, starting last year. People can't afford new houses with a mortgage with rising interest rates. Fewer young adults ("Gen Z") are choosing, proportionally, to go to college. The plummeting birth rate and the highly strict immigration controls as well as our political instability have all sent the message to international students that they're not wanted here. The system of gaokao has been changed recently, so more Chinese parents won't be sending their children to the US where they'll be charged full tuition plus some. The shortfall in tuition is being made up by cutting academic and sports programs. My friends who work in college finance expect the plummeting birth rate and dropping international enrollment to really hit colleges hard in 2025, so you can expect a lot of academic cuts, sports cuts, and outright college failures barring massive bailouts for the institutions. My college had to cut 3 sports teams and 6 majors recently along with tuition.
Many older folks are retiring in fields where they might have worked part time for extra money or for that thing that they don't think is worth it anymore following COVID. I've heard it called the "silver tsunami." The "boomers" are all retiring with only those without retirement savings or without generous relatives to fall back working for health insurance or for a little money to pay for food.
The number of flight incidents with rude, disruptive, or violent flyers has reached records levels. Working a grocery store over the past few years supposedly part time but always overtime lately, I have noticed more entitled, rude, desperate, and stressed out customers more generally. It's not just about masks either. I was threatened two years ago because we didn't have soy baby formula in stock for example, as if there were some being hidden in back stock.
In accounting where I work now, we had the senior associates and middle management all quit in a short timespan for other firms. 3/4 of CPAs are eligible for retirement. Your fortune 500 company audits are now being handled by people collectively with way less experience than they used to. Standard operating procedure seems to SALY ("Same As Last Year") in audit the past couple of years or blame discrepancies on COVID. So much fraud has likely happened that will probably never come to light.
Nurses and doctors are all facing mental health crises. Violence against medical professionals is rising at rapid rates even prior to the pandemic. Many health professionals don't report assaults either because of their altruistic tendencies. More than half of nurses are thinking or planning on quitting their jobs. More than half of all doctors wouldn't recommend or don't want their children to go into medicine. Here's a fun little excercise for you. Google the nearest hospital near you and see how many openings they have. Especially for security. The hospital near me has never had a security officer. Now they have five. Hospital workers are being taught de-escalation techniques and taking self defense classes. Senior homes are facing record shortages of labor.
I suppose this is a very brief and calm overview of what's going on. I hope that programmers appreciate how much pay and how little stress you receive in comparison to many other industries. Expect to take care of more relatives, pay more to eat out, and healthcare shortages near you soon. Filipino nurses and teachers are being trained and brought in to fill positions filled briefly by the national guard. Our country is in crisis, and most of us just don't know it yet. I'm not even getting into the healthcare issues in Britain, Canada, and Australia as well.