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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Many of the 3rd-tier institutions are going to go bankrupt anyway

Source? I have been reading this every year since like the financial crisis.

The number of students graduating high school peaked in 2025 and has now started a gradual decline. Colleges are essentially now playing a game of "musical chairs" competing for students and there aren't enough to go around. The elite institutions and cost-effective state schools will probably be fine but less exclusive private colleges without a solid value proposition have no clear path to survival.

https://www.wiche.edu/resources/report-u-s-high-school-gradu...

> number of students graduating high school peaked in 2025 and has now started a gradual decline

Hasn’t this happened after each boom generation?

Not like this. Someday it will likely turn around, but it's probably going to be after we're long dead.

How do we know that was a peak? There's only been one more year of data

We have pretty accurate counts of numbers of babies born each year, and number of child immigrants. So that makes it straightforward to forecast the number of high school graduates. People are having fewer children.

https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics

>62.8% of high school (or equivalent) graduates go on to postsecondary study.

>Enrollment among new high school graduates has declined 10.4% since its peak in 2009 (70.1%).

There are still a lot of kids that could go to those 3rd tier universities, but choose not to. The cost/benefit is not perceived to be there anymore.

Well since you mentioned it, I posit that most of the financial issues the world is facing today is because the GFC wasn’t allowed to occur, it’s been a slow bleeding out ever since.

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