America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.
Most students are coming from countries with significantly worse demographic trends. The population inversion is already here but it is being felt by schools first.
In 10 years it will be for new employees, in 40 years it will be shortages in medical care.
strict9 · 7h ago
>America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.
This is kind of misleading. There were 16 nonprofit college and university closures in 2024 [1]
I also have reservations about making predictions of what will happen in 10 years, much less 40. There are challenges relating to demographic change but it's not predetermined as you present it.
Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book [2]
> Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book
Fortunately, almost twenty years before the Population Bomb book, others such as Alfred Sauvy were already warning against confident overpopulation arguments. They suggested more reasonable arguments such as examining countries on a case-by-case basis [1].
The Population Bomb is a great reference. This was something a family member of mine was seriously worried about in her younger days.
Population is an extremely complex, dynamic system, and I don't think we have any way of actually predicting it -- all we can do is look at trend lines and make projections.
(caveat - not a social scientist; just my current opinion; etc.)
rich_sasha · 7h ago
There's a bit of a difference.
Population Bomb's core claim was about the instantaneous rate of reproduction. This is a complex stochastic process. It could drop to 0 overnight if people decide no more babies.
But population decline is easier to model mid term because you don't need to make almost any assumptions. The next 18 years of university intake are all already born and there ain't a lot of them. The only way for them is down.
Clearly, what's beyond that is hard to forecast, but even then making a pretty good forecast for the next 25 years only depends on forecasting births in the next 7 years.
saghm · 7h ago
And now less than half a century later, there are even people who are worried about falling birth rates in some places, because apparently it's concerning if we don't keep growing the population at the same rate.
FredPret · 7h ago
It is concerning when all of our major social systems are built on the idea of an growing population and a growing economy (most pressing right now is funding pensions).
Maybe we'll have a billion humans living in orbit in a century. Unsure if they'll be willing to pay Earth Tax though.
mothballed · 6h ago
US Citizens have to pay taxes even in orbit or on the ISS, or even on Mars or wherever in the universe they may be. This is fairly unique though, there's like one African dictatorship that does the same and that's about it.
FredPret · 4h ago
Let's see how that goes after the Lunar Tea Party
amanaplanacanal · 5h ago
Immigration can easily cover that though. If you can get past the widespread anti-immigrant sentiment.
msgodel · 4h ago
Immigration at that scale is completely indistinguishable from invasion.
At small scales you can have them give up their culture and assimilate but at replacement scales you just turn your country into a third world country. That's completely unacceptable.
mothballed · 4h ago
Dubai has managed to not let that happen even at rates far faster than replacement, but they don't give their immigrants voting rights, and usually not permanent residence (unless they are rich).
msgodel · 4h ago
Right the only way to actually use immigration that way is essentially slaves and that has other economic (not to mention horrible moral) problems.
mothballed · 4h ago
They definitely have literal slaves there, as well as the highest per capita rate of influx of high-net-worth individuals of anywhere in the world, and then a lot of people in-between.
amanaplanacanal · 2h ago
Immigration is easily distinguishable from invasion, by anybody who understands the concept of consent.
One is invited, the other is unwanted.
mathiaspoint · 1h ago
I'm not sure there's a single Western country that wanted the kind of immigration it's getting. Many of them like Sweden seem like slow motion wars complete with an average two bombings per day. Other places like the UK have mass rapes, in the US everyone just quietly circles the wagons and stops socializing, in Canada pretty much every public service is suddenly unavailable and there are no jobs etc.
No one wanted or invited any of that.
unsnap_biceps · 2h ago
invasion is forced upon the receiving country and immigration is controlled by the receiving country. They are not the same thing at all
salynchnew · 7h ago
Historically, America has grown its population via immigration.
Whoops!
polski-g · 6h ago
The TFR decline of the rest of the world over the past decade has been astronomical. There simply aren't that many young people left in the world to pull from. South American countries have seen >50% declines.
allturtles · 6h ago
# of X closing / time isn't a meaningful measure of decline. You would have to subtract # closing / time from # opening / time. But even a net loss of colleges doesn't necessarily indicate a loss of students, it could be that bigger colleges are absorbing smaller ones. If you are making an argument about a decline in student population, you should just look at student population data. It's more-or-less flat since 2020 [0].
There's already a massive shortage when it comes to medical care.
jnwatson · 7h ago
In a market economy, shortages are simply a statement that the buyers value a good or service less than the market price.
Medical care shortages are mostly a function that hospitals don't want to pay nurses market rate and then treat them poorly.
The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.
phil21 · 6h ago
> The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.
It's not just this. It's also that the career is starting to suck.
Over half the doctors I know who I met while they were in medical school/residency are now out of the practice. They counted down the days until they had their student debt paid off and bounced to non-patient care roles outside the medical system.
The entire profession has been captured by the administrative and managerial class. Doctors have had most of their agency stripped from them, and it's an exhausting career choice for someone who generally has a ton of options at their disposal.
I expect the trend to get even worse as more and more pressure gets applied to the medical system both due to demographics and the endless march of making everything corporate.
No comments yet
realitybitez · 7h ago
The AMA specifically restricts residency spots. They cry about medicare funding, but it is all about keeping the supply of doctors artificially low. Unlike tech, there is no free market in medicine, which is why 20% of the national gdp is consumed on healthcare while doctors drive away in BMWs to the bank
lovich · 6h ago
The doctors are not why the US pays more for medicine than other western countries. It’s also a little rich coming from a software focused board when we make equivalent or better than a lot of doctors
slipperydippery · 6h ago
It 100% is one of the reasons. We pay medical personnel way higher wages than peer states.
US healthcare is so expensive because basically every single part of it costs more than it "should", by quite a bit. Including, yes, doctors.
lovich · 2h ago
You’re going to have to do more work to prove the size of the problem is equivalent or larger than the well documented issues with insurance, before you can start pinning the blame on them as a why.
If the doctors are causing like 1% of the issue, it’s not likely to be worth the time and energy to rectify vs if you can point to it being like 50% of the issue.
I’m pulling those numbers out of my ass so don’t feel like I’m trying to hold you to the literal values but I’d need to see _some_ data to even consider supporting changes to the AMA and laws surrounding them
slipperydippery · 1h ago
I did a ton of looking into this over the years. That everything is a little bit at fault, is why if you exhaustively eliminate (say) insurance overhead, it leaves a weird amount of the elevated costs intact.
Thinking you’ve found the one main reason makes it easy for opponents of reform to dismiss your solution, because you haven’t found it, because there’s not a main reason. It also means “cut private insurance out of the process” doesn’t fix it
Consider: public insurance schemes in the US spend far more for some given amount of care than peer states do, even as provides complain these programs don’t pay enough—that latter part is because all their vendors, suppliers, and personnel demand more money than their counterparts in the rest of the OECD states. Every single part of the system costs too much.
Switzerland pays more than us for doctors, barely, but also has unusually high healthcare costs for Europe (though not as bad as ours) and is richer than the US. Luxembourg is close but is an outlier for basically everything, they crush us in median income and such as well. Bermuda, a little lower, but it’s an island nation (everything’s more expensive) and, like Lux, richer than the US, another outlier. Nearest comparable looks like Australia, paying doctors an average (this avoids missing the effects of crazy-expensive top-end specialists, as a median might) about 76% what we do. The rest of the OECD’s lower than that.
You want one thing that is contributing, but such a trivial amount that it’s hardly worth addressing until everything else is fixed: it’s doctors’ liability insurance. They really want to reduce that cost, for obvious reasons, and Republicans want to fix it because… they hate poor people who’ve been harmed being compensated “too much” I guess… and it does contribute to higher costs, but very little compared to practically everything else. That one gets way more attention than it merits.
The unifying factor of other countries’ healthcare schemes that keeps them cheaper than the US doesn’t seem to be that they’ve minimized the role of private insurance (some haven’t!) but that they have explicit (like government-set price lists) or or implicit (via e.g. monopsony) price controls. It seems like you can use any of several approaches, some of which keep private health insurance in a prominent role (Switzerland! Though they at least have the good sense to force them to be nonprofits, IIRC) so long as you have, one way or another, price controls.
The only near-exception to this I’m aware of is Singapore, but… it’s Singapore. Plus they do have some explicit price controls, and I think it’s fair to say healthcare providers there might consider there to be a persistent, credible implied threat of more price controls or even harsher measures from the government, should prices rise too much, because… it’s Singapore.
[edit] FWIW I do think fixing the insurance situation is an excellent place to start, even the best starting point, and that the insurers in the US are probably beyond salvaging through integrating them into a better system, and should just be eliminated or their role drastically reduced; I think this would make less progress toward fixing prices than some suppose it would, though would still do a lot for that, but it’d, crucially, fix most of the hidden costs of our system, like patient-hours lost to waiting on hold to try to get insurance to pay what they’re supposed to, HR folks messing with insurance-related issues, et c, which are huge and don’t make it into straight cost comparisons with other countries because those aren’t “healthcare costs” (putting a dollar value on that would make us look even worse than we already do)
lovich · 39m ago
That is interesting information and probably worth rectifying if it all holds true but I want to be clear that my contention was with the framing of the comment that made it sound like the AMA getting doctor pay higher was _the_ reason not _a_ reason
mothballed · 6h ago
Doctors can send men in with guns to imprison, and if they resist, kill, those who engage in their profession without going through the gates of their fiefdom, though.
In software you can be a nobody off the street, straight out of prison, if someone pays you money to write software then that is that.
The doctors cannot send in men with guns, the government can if it feels that’s against the law, and you’re not going to be killed for just “resisting”.
In the software world we also take on zero fucking liability for just building software on the street or is your circle full of people who commonly carry Software Malpractice Insurance?
FYI, the men with guns come for software engineers as well if the rich want it. Look up Sergey Aleynikov
mothballed · 6h ago
The odds of getting collared for practicing medicine without a license/credentials are orders of magnitude higher than getting collared for writing software, or even practice engineering even though that's sometimes a licensed field.
AMA is the biggest gatekeeper in getting there.
lovich · 6h ago
Yes, the odds of getting arrested for breaking the law are higher than if you don’t break the law.
Look you’re obviously against the AMA, and there’s arguments against their guild and its practices that I’m amenable to, but trying to pin the financial problems with our healthcare system on them is ludicrous given how many other large problems are in the system. Insurance middlemen are undoubtedly a bigger cost
mothballed · 6h ago
>The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.
NPs are starting to get around this by getting independent or mostly independent practices in many states. The Doctors can still kick PAs in the teeth because they are usually under the medical board, but they can't do nearly as much to get their greedy claws on NPs because they are governed by a separate nursing board that nurses have more control of.
realitybitez · 7h ago
There's already an artificial shortage when it comes to medical care.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 7h ago
We live in a country where many complain that there aren't any jobs to be had, especially jobs with good wages/salaries. It's disingenuous, or at least very confused, to state that "we have a looming, massive shortage of medical workers". These two thoughts aren't really mutually compatible. Sure, there is a training/education issue, but pretending that it's just intractable and that we have to import workers is absurd.
wakawaka28 · 2h ago
Keep in mind that this problem can be solved. 40 years is long enough to raise two whole new generations of adults.
dcchambers · 5h ago
> America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.
It's interesting to see that but then also see boasts of "record freshman class sizes" at major public universities every single year (eg my Alma Mater, Wisconsin).
Is this a consolidation that is happening?
arghandugh · 6h ago
This is because Republican fascists overthrew the United States of America and threatened to kidnap and torture overseas students attending domestic universities.
It is unclear to me why anyone in the comments here is under another impression. These were newsworthy events.
next_xibalba · 6h ago
> overthrew
They weren't elected?
watwut · 5h ago
They were elected, proceeded to break the law and ignore it. Now they are trying to figure put how to get rid of the pesky voting.
kjkjadksj · 3h ago
People were mislead with propaganda to vote against their own interests.
brailsafe · 2h ago
so... elected
stouset · 2h ago
Adolf Hitler was elected. I would still say he overthrew the government of Germany. We are in the midst of a frighteningly similar takeover.
user982 · 2h ago
"Yes, history repeats itself. You're fooling people with your propaganda."
"Oh, Sawatzki... You don't understand. In 1933, people were not fooled by propaganda. They elected a leader, who openly disclosed his plans in great clarity. The Germans elected me."
Given the amount of gerrymandering, active voter suppression, and long-standing measures to ensure that certain groups of people have a harder time voting than others (specifically, those who have to work hourly jobs—especially those that are not a standard 9-5 office job), even leaving aside any other possible method of ensuring votes for anyone except Trump counted, there's plenty of room to cast suspicion on the degree to which the outcome of the election represents the will of the people.
esbranson · 1h ago
California Proposition 50 (2025) to gerrymander California was not put forward by Trump. And as someone who was challenged at the polling station by a leftist white woman in 2016, then as now as an hourly worker, you're wrong about voter suppression as well. (How many unreported incidents make something systematic?) You have been sold a lie.
next_xibalba · 28m ago
It is very interesting that the last governor of California who was a republican did the most to try to ensure fair voting that produced candidates more representative of the views of the electorate.
aredox · 5h ago
One man, one vote - one last time.
yongjik · 3h ago
I don't think Trump really cares about international students. Trump's real enemy is colleges (and the educated people colleges represent).
Anyone who responds "But isn't it a good thing that there are more opportunities for American students?" is missing the forest for the trees. Trump is not trying to open up more opportunities for education; he's trying to destroy education.
psadri · 6h ago
Somewhat related data point - our local elementary school used to have 5 first grade classes a few years ago and now they are down to 3. It's a large % drop over just a few years. This is going to move like a wave through the rest of the years all the way through to university.
esbranson · 2h ago
The disconnect between academia and journalism on the one hand, and smart and intelligent people on the other is breathtaking. One side sold generations of the other down river because of greed and oikophobia. And they do it with fearmongering such as this. To quote chat bot:
> I couldn’t find any stories on NPR in 2025 (solely this year, not earlier) that focus explicitly on positive trends in academia or higher education.
Imagine my surprise. In years to come, we should recognize they will have such stories, they will implicitly include the 2025 time frame, and those destroyed by the Kool-Aid will be none the wiser to anything positive. Compare National Propaganda Radio to Colorado Public Radio or The Colorado Sun and it becomes obvious: NPR and its ilk are the problem destroying our future youth, not the lack of international students.
pbiggar · 6h ago
Not surprising. There are 3 main causes here:
- general anti-immigrant attitudes, policies, and policing (ICE)
- deportations of students exercising free speech rights (to criticize Israel)
- forcing colleges to change policies (again, to protect Israel from criticism by students and student groups)
Most students are coming from countries with significantly worse demographic trends. The population inversion is already here but it is being felt by schools first.
In 10 years it will be for new employees, in 40 years it will be shortages in medical care.
This is kind of misleading. There were 16 nonprofit college and university closures in 2024 [1]
I also have reservations about making predictions of what will happen in 10 years, much less 40. There are challenges relating to demographic change but it's not predetermined as you present it.
Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book [2]
1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/financial-healt...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
Fortunately, almost twenty years before the Population Bomb book, others such as Alfred Sauvy were already warning against confident overpopulation arguments. They suggested more reasonable arguments such as examining countries on a case-by-case basis [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sauvy#Key_ideas
Population is an extremely complex, dynamic system, and I don't think we have any way of actually predicting it -- all we can do is look at trend lines and make projections.
(caveat - not a social scientist; just my current opinion; etc.)
Population Bomb's core claim was about the instantaneous rate of reproduction. This is a complex stochastic process. It could drop to 0 overnight if people decide no more babies.
But population decline is easier to model mid term because you don't need to make almost any assumptions. The next 18 years of university intake are all already born and there ain't a lot of them. The only way for them is down.
Clearly, what's beyond that is hard to forecast, but even then making a pretty good forecast for the next 25 years only depends on forecasting births in the next 7 years.
Maybe we'll have a billion humans living in orbit in a century. Unsure if they'll be willing to pay Earth Tax though.
At small scales you can have them give up their culture and assimilate but at replacement scales you just turn your country into a third world country. That's completely unacceptable.
One is invited, the other is unwanted.
No one wanted or invited any of that.
Whoops!
[0]: https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
Medical care shortages are mostly a function that hospitals don't want to pay nurses market rate and then treat them poorly.
The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.
It's not just this. It's also that the career is starting to suck.
Over half the doctors I know who I met while they were in medical school/residency are now out of the practice. They counted down the days until they had their student debt paid off and bounced to non-patient care roles outside the medical system.
The entire profession has been captured by the administrative and managerial class. Doctors have had most of their agency stripped from them, and it's an exhausting career choice for someone who generally has a ton of options at their disposal.
I expect the trend to get even worse as more and more pressure gets applied to the medical system both due to demographics and the endless march of making everything corporate.
No comments yet
US healthcare is so expensive because basically every single part of it costs more than it "should", by quite a bit. Including, yes, doctors.
If the doctors are causing like 1% of the issue, it’s not likely to be worth the time and energy to rectify vs if you can point to it being like 50% of the issue.
I’m pulling those numbers out of my ass so don’t feel like I’m trying to hold you to the literal values but I’d need to see _some_ data to even consider supporting changes to the AMA and laws surrounding them
Thinking you’ve found the one main reason makes it easy for opponents of reform to dismiss your solution, because you haven’t found it, because there’s not a main reason. It also means “cut private insurance out of the process” doesn’t fix it
Consider: public insurance schemes in the US spend far more for some given amount of care than peer states do, even as provides complain these programs don’t pay enough—that latter part is because all their vendors, suppliers, and personnel demand more money than their counterparts in the rest of the OECD states. Every single part of the system costs too much.
Switzerland pays more than us for doctors, barely, but also has unusually high healthcare costs for Europe (though not as bad as ours) and is richer than the US. Luxembourg is close but is an outlier for basically everything, they crush us in median income and such as well. Bermuda, a little lower, but it’s an island nation (everything’s more expensive) and, like Lux, richer than the US, another outlier. Nearest comparable looks like Australia, paying doctors an average (this avoids missing the effects of crazy-expensive top-end specialists, as a median might) about 76% what we do. The rest of the OECD’s lower than that.
You want one thing that is contributing, but such a trivial amount that it’s hardly worth addressing until everything else is fixed: it’s doctors’ liability insurance. They really want to reduce that cost, for obvious reasons, and Republicans want to fix it because… they hate poor people who’ve been harmed being compensated “too much” I guess… and it does contribute to higher costs, but very little compared to practically everything else. That one gets way more attention than it merits.
The unifying factor of other countries’ healthcare schemes that keeps them cheaper than the US doesn’t seem to be that they’ve minimized the role of private insurance (some haven’t!) but that they have explicit (like government-set price lists) or or implicit (via e.g. monopsony) price controls. It seems like you can use any of several approaches, some of which keep private health insurance in a prominent role (Switzerland! Though they at least have the good sense to force them to be nonprofits, IIRC) so long as you have, one way or another, price controls.
The only near-exception to this I’m aware of is Singapore, but… it’s Singapore. Plus they do have some explicit price controls, and I think it’s fair to say healthcare providers there might consider there to be a persistent, credible implied threat of more price controls or even harsher measures from the government, should prices rise too much, because… it’s Singapore.
[edit] FWIW I do think fixing the insurance situation is an excellent place to start, even the best starting point, and that the insurers in the US are probably beyond salvaging through integrating them into a better system, and should just be eliminated or their role drastically reduced; I think this would make less progress toward fixing prices than some suppose it would, though would still do a lot for that, but it’d, crucially, fix most of the hidden costs of our system, like patient-hours lost to waiting on hold to try to get insurance to pay what they’re supposed to, HR folks messing with insurance-related issues, et c, which are huge and don’t make it into straight cost comparisons with other countries because those aren’t “healthcare costs” (putting a dollar value on that would make us look even worse than we already do)
In software you can be a nobody off the street, straight out of prison, if someone pays you money to write software then that is that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...
In the software world we also take on zero fucking liability for just building software on the street or is your circle full of people who commonly carry Software Malpractice Insurance?
FYI, the men with guns come for software engineers as well if the rich want it. Look up Sergey Aleynikov
AMA is the biggest gatekeeper in getting there.
Look you’re obviously against the AMA, and there’s arguments against their guild and its practices that I’m amenable to, but trying to pin the financial problems with our healthcare system on them is ludicrous given how many other large problems are in the system. Insurance middlemen are undoubtedly a bigger cost
NPs are starting to get around this by getting independent or mostly independent practices in many states. The Doctors can still kick PAs in the teeth because they are usually under the medical board, but they can't do nearly as much to get their greedy claws on NPs because they are governed by a separate nursing board that nurses have more control of.
It's interesting to see that but then also see boasts of "record freshman class sizes" at major public universities every single year (eg my Alma Mater, Wisconsin).
Is this a consolidation that is happening?
It is unclear to me why anyone in the comments here is under another impression. These were newsworthy events.
They weren't elected?
"Oh, Sawatzki... You don't understand. In 1933, people were not fooled by propaganda. They elected a leader, who openly disclosed his plans in great clarity. The Germans elected me."
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ALTkMpPLuU
Anyone who responds "But isn't it a good thing that there are more opportunities for American students?" is missing the forest for the trees. Trump is not trying to open up more opportunities for education; he's trying to destroy education.
> I couldn’t find any stories on NPR in 2025 (solely this year, not earlier) that focus explicitly on positive trends in academia or higher education.
Imagine my surprise. In years to come, we should recognize they will have such stories, they will implicitly include the 2025 time frame, and those destroyed by the Kool-Aid will be none the wiser to anything positive. Compare National Propaganda Radio to Colorado Public Radio or The Colorado Sun and it becomes obvious: NPR and its ilk are the problem destroying our future youth, not the lack of international students.
- general anti-immigrant attitudes, policies, and policing (ICE)
- deportations of students exercising free speech rights (to criticize Israel)
- forcing colleges to change policies (again, to protect Israel from criticism by students and student groups)