Pratique du Shadowing: America is running out of teenagers. Universities are worried | BBC Global - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

The US is about to have far fewer teenagers.

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The US is about to have far fewer teenagers.

And for universities in particular,

that's a really big problem.

Colleges, of course, rely on a steady flow of young people coming onto their campuses.

But right around the 2008 financial crisis,

Americans just started having fewer kids.

Now, nearly 18 years later,

there are fewer teenagers than there usually are.

And that's before you even ask them whether they think college is really still worth it.

This isn't just a one-time dip.

For the foreseeable future, year after year,

America is going to have fewer students than the year before.

By 2040, there'll be at least half a million fewer 18-year-olds than there are today.

And that shift won't just reshape campuses,

it could reshape the entire country.

Some of us can think,

well, this doesn't apply to me,

I'm not, you know, in education.

But I think it will apply to all of us.

We're anticipating somewhat fewer students entering into those college pools.

But then four or six years later,

we have fewer young people coming on the job market.

We have fewer young professionals available to support people in old age and so on.

So even if you're OK with the new normal when we get there,

the transition can be hard.

So colleges are looking at your numbers and they see the decline.

When does the real crunch hit them?

When do they have to address this?

I would say sort of yesterday.

The problem, it's not going to happen all at once.

I think the problem is not so much that there's this instantaneous drop.

It's that it's just one year after another with the tightening of the belt.

And so if you experience that and you don't make fundamental changes,

instead you just try to belt tighten on the budget,

we'll cut this program, we'll lay that person off.

That's not a very strategic way to get through this.

And doing that one year might be fine.

Doing it three years in a row might be okay doing it 18,

20 years in a row is not going to leave the

institution in a position of strength where they're actually meeting their student needs.

American colleges presumably are looking at this drop-off in their potential client base and thinking what?

How are they thinking they might plan for this?

I think unfortunately the number one answer is we're going to recruit harder

and I say unfortunately not because we shouldn't think hard about expanding access and recruiting more students.

We should for a large number of reasons.

But it's just that the numbers don't add up if that's our only response.

So the numbers of babies born since 2007 have declined by over 15%.

And so if we imagine overcoming that just by recruiting harder,

we would have to attract a ridiculously large fraction of high school graduates into higher ed.

And that just doesn't seem like it's going to happen over the next 15 years.

Another response we're seeing is that institutions are focusing on student success and retention.

We can maintain enrollments with the same number of students entering the front door

if we just have fewer students leaving the back door.

And to me, that's the most promising outcome,

that if we can do better by our students,

we're better fulfilling our missions,

we've got fewer students who are dropping out and yet being saddled with debt,

we have more students who are succeeding.

Yes, there's a financial incentive for colleges and universities to do that,

but it's also obviously a great thing for our students and for society.

So I'm assuming, okay, so all of these universities are out there and they're all competing for a smaller number of students.

I'm assuming that the colleges that are at the top level,

they're still going to be okay they can still get the kind of cream of the crop.

People are still going to want to go there.

Is it then that it's a cascading effect?

So you get more elite universities doing okay in terms of applications,

but as you go down the scale,

the more affordable and perhaps less prestigious universities and community colleges are the ones where we start to get a drop off.

Is that right?

Is that how it would work?

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right to be concerned about that.

I think for two reasons,

the more selective institutions will do fine.

First, they're only accepting one in five or one in 10 or one in 20 of their applicants currently.

So if we have fewer applicants in the pool,

they can just go deeper into their pool.

So the more elite institutions don't have a whole lot to fear directly from this.

I would say, though, that with that cascading effect you're talking about,

it's going to create a lot of hunger and some desperate moves by institutions further down the food chain.

And as they discount tuition more aggressively,

you will see greater pressure,

even on the selective institutions,

as they talk with parents whose students have applied to multiple colleges.

And they say, why should we pay

so much money to go to your school when we're getting a really great financial aid offer from this other school?

Okay, I think that is actually a very good discussion to be having.

I've had four children go through the American higher education system.

I have a daughter who's in college at the moment and it's costing me,

I mean, just like an eye popping amount of money to send her to a private university.

Anything in my mind that would put pressure on universities to bring down the costs,

actually, I mean, paradoxically, the numbers that you're talking about in the kind of supply and demand of basic economics,

if the demand is lower,

does the supply have to get cheaper?

I mean, are we looking at peak university cost in the state?

Maybe that's not a bad thing.

There are some positives.

So again, I don't think we're going to see as much of this at the truly top most prestigious institutions.

But for other institutions, we are going to see families have an easier conversation.

I think the word of caution is that the quality education

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that the American system has provided really does cost a lot of money.

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And so when we see this more aggressive discounting,

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and the college board suggests that we're already seeing declining net fee income for about a decade now,

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what that looks like on the campus is that there are fewer resources to support that high quality product.

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And so I think parents have to be a little bit concerned that you might be getting a low sticker price,

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you might be paying a small amount,

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but when your students don't get the same level of support because colleges are lowering the price but cutting the support,

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you might not be getting the education you thought you were hoping to get.

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I mean, beyond reducing the number of universities,

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because potentially, I assume if there are fewer people going to universities,

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some of those universities will just fail and we'll have fewer universities.

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Does this shrinking population also mean that universities might change their offerings?

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Would we have more of a focus on trade schools or vocational degrees,

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for example, or is that a separate question from the sheer numbers of people being born?

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No, I think it's very much the same question,

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because I think when we think about recruiting harder,

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for instance, we should try to attract more students.

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It's very hard to do that without thinking,

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but what are the programs that we're offering?

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How do we make these programs the kinds of programs that students want and that future employers need?

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Similarly, if we say we want to improve retention.

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There are a number of factors that we know go into retention,

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but one of them is students seeing a connection between what they're learning in their class

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and the life that they're pursuing after college.

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And this doesn't suggest, I'm at a liberal arts college,

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so I'm never going to suggest that we need everybody to be in a pre-professional program,

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but we do need to increasingly think about how we need

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to adapt what we're doing in the classroom to make it easier for students to imagine those futures

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and to take those next steps.

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As a professor, can I just ask you personally living in this moment.

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I mean, there are clearly enormous amounts of kind of turbulent,

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an enormous amount of turbulent change that is happening in our society and in our education system at the moment.

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But you're a professor teaching in a liberal arts college,

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not just dealing down the track with fewer people being born and therefore fewer students,

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and therefore potentially less demand for the services that you have to offer and your college has to offer,

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but also a rapidly changing technology that we don't fully understand the impacts of in terms of jobs and education.

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How are you in your kind of daily life confronting all of these changes?

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Is it stressful?

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Is it exciting?

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Is it bewildering not quite knowing what's coming around the corner.

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I'm not, you know, I'm your therapist.

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I'm cheaper than a therapist.

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Go ahead.

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It's all of the above, right?

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I mean, there are some real exciting things when we think about AI

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and how can we think about teaching students to use this tool effectively?

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What are its limitations?

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What are its strengths?

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But it is obviously just a constant load of work that comes with change and change and more change.

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So I think it's a more turbulent time than when I started my career 25 or 30 years ago.

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There were some things that were really great about that stability,

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but I think there are some really great things about change as well.

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It focuses you to really think hard about what is our primary mission and how can I live that out every day?

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How can I connect with every student

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that comes into my office with every conversation

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that I have in a way that while not necessarily comfortable might lead us to be better versions of ourselves.

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And so So I try to remind myself that we can,

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to some degree, choose how we will adapt to these kinds of stresses.

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Presumably we don't want to break,

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but we can also choose instead of choosing that fragile pathway,

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we can choose instead to be a system that gets stronger under stress.

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I imagine your advice is in demand.

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So what is your advice?

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What's the advice that you give to college administrators,

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to colleges as businesses, ensure the survival of the university education model in the States?

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Yes, I think the bottom line is to focus on your mission.

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And that has several parts to it.

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There are all sorts of changes that we can make that don't align with who we are.

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Those changes and tactics that don't align with our bigger identity usually are not successful.

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So the first step is to figure out what is our mission and have just great clarity on that.

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And the second reason is because I think what higher ed offers students does have great value.

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But we have to deliver that.

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And when we've cut corners or we haven't fulfilled the mission is where we have students walking away and saying,

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this isn't worth it to me.

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So our best strategy is to think very clearly about what is our mission,

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what are we trying to do for these students,

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and then how can I deliver on that more and more effectively every day.

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Professor Graw, thank you very much.

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Thank you.

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Pratique du Shadowing: America is running out of teenagers. Universities are worried | BBC Global - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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