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Kyla Scanlon is speaking from personal experience. It can be a great school if you put in the effort. Will the market will reward that effort with a job? Maybe.
What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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.
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.
Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#23> 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. Thi…
And the best part is that even when the labor shortage ends, the myth that the credential was ever necessary is permanently broken.
Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#24> 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. Thi…
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 agricul…
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Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#25[flagged]
Kyla Scanlon is speaking from personal experience. It can be a great school if you put in the effort. Will the market will reward that effort with a job? Maybe.
In my book a great school would likely have a low-ish acceptance rate. And so they could (even though they may not be happy about it) absorb some amount of declining applications by adjusting their acceptance bar. WKU's acceptance rate is like 95%. They're already taking ~everyone who applies. I question whether school quality truly plays no role at an institution which struggles to find a student they wouldn't admit.
Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#26Seems 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.
Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#27So... off to the trades then?
Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#28Demographics 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.
Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#29Seems 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.
Because the oligarchs who own the media and the politicians don’t care about the petty lives of regular people.
Re: What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Rich foreigners will send their kids to big name schools, and WKU will adapt their pricing to get the kids of middle class foreigners.