Regional public universities like Ship are enduring painful layoffs and consolidation.Ĭlasses will shrink for most of the next two decades Starved of students and the tuition revenue they bring, small private colleges in New England have begun to blink off the map. College enrollment began slowly receding after the millennial enrollment wave peaked in 2010, particularly in regions that were already experiencing below-average birth rates while simultaneously losing population to out-migration. In some places, the crisis has already begun. These institutions have their pick of applicants and can easily keep classes full.įor everyone else, the consequences could be dire. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”Īmong the small number of elite colleges and research universities - think the Princetons and the Penn States - the cliff will be no big deal. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. ![]() In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Or that the problem is about to get a lot worse - not just here, but at colleges and universities nationwide. There was no way to tell, from the outside, that Ship was a shrinking institution. It was the kind of bright-blue autumn day that you would see on a brochure. There was a line at the coffee shop in the student union. Young men and women wearing logoed Champion sweatshirts bustled between buildings. ![]() The “Ship” Raiders also won it all in 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2013, which I know because I saw it written in big letters on a banner festooning the fieldhouse on Ship’s campus in south-central Pennsylvania when I visited last month. ![]() In 2021, Shippensburg University won the NCAA Division II Field Hockey championship, completing an undefeated season with a 3-0 victory over archrival West Chester.
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