What happens to college towns after peak 18-year-old?

Summary

Bowling Green, Kentucky — Oct. 31, 2023: Downtown commercial business area surrounding Fountain Square Park. Bowling Green is also home to Western Kentucky University and the National Corvette Museum (Photo by Pgiam/Getty Images)Earlier this year, on a visit back to my alma mater, Western Kentucky University, I spoke to a student majoring in business who told me he might drop out of college to take a factory job near home. Tuition was going up (again) and he wasn’t sure if there was anything waiting for him at the end of this yellow brick road. He was scared.I certainly didn’t know what to tell him. I wanted to say the degree would pay off, that education is worth the investment. But I graduated in 2019, months before the pandemic. College has changed, and so have jobs. I didn’t have an answer for him because the institutions themselves don’t seem to have an answer either.The irony wasn’t lost on me. A student leaving college for factory work — the very jobs that disappeared in the First Rust Belt, now somehow seeming more reliable than a degree. It’s the kind of reversal that makes you wonder if the life path forward is actually backward, or if there’s a path at all. The answer, it turns out, is bigger than one student’s choice.This student, like many others, isn’t just responding to an immediate economic calculation. He’s also caught in an invisible (and increasingly visible) demographic force: America is running out of people his age. Even if colleges fixed their cost and value proposition tomorrow — even if tuition dropped and job prospects improved — there would still be fewer students like him to fill seats. We are hitting peak 18-year-old, and the decline is just beginning.Western Kentucky University, like many colleges across the United States, is hollowing out. This isn’t necessarily because they are bad schools — many, like WKU, are great schools. That’s why my alma mater feels like an early warning siren for a much scarier problem.America is facing its ne...