OK, I’m not being clear. Here’s alI I meant:

• total undergrad numbers have fallen almost 50% at St. Cloud State in the last 5 years, according to their own published data
• So we would expect enrollments in philosophy to have dropped almost 50% over that time, even if philosophy remains as popular among undergraduates as before the drop.
• I don’t know how much philosophy enrollments have fallen, but mathematically they would have to have fallen virtually to zero in order for the leading cause of the decrease to be philosophy-specific. (I don’t actually know if philosophy enrollments have fallen at all as a fraction of overall enrollments; that data isn’t obviously available.)

Is the decrease in St.Cloud State overall enrollments a consequence of the overall decrease in Minnesota enrollments? Almost certainly. Is the latter because of overall student concerns about the value of higher education? Maybe, I don’t know. (I’d want to see how the actual number of 18-25 year olds in Minnesota has changed over that period.) But even if so, there’s a big difference between ‘enrollments are down because students don’t value philosophy’ (which one can try to address by, e.g., better in-university course design and marketing) and ‘enrollments are down because fewer 18-25 year olds see the value of a university degree’, which has different (and more challenging) solutions.

My main reason for the original comment was just to get the overall massive decrease in St Cloud State undergrad numbers into the discussion. It seems critical to what’s going on there, but didn’t get mentioned in the OP.

Is the decrease in St.Cloud State overall enrollments a consequence of the overall decrease in Minnesota enrollments? Almost certainly. Is the latter because of overall student concerns about the value of higher education? Maybe, I don’t know. 

Okay, thanks, this is helpful. I took you to be saying we had good reason either to doubt that second explanation, or to doubt it’s applicability to philosophy. And my (admittedly spotty) survey of the terrain suggests both that people are much less sanguine about the value of higher education since the economic crash of 2008, and that philosophy hasn’t been immune to that shift in perception (in a non-factive sense of “perception”). So I’m glad to clear that up, and I’ll continue operating with the defeasible supposition that we’re facing a crisis in perceived value for both higher education in general and philosophy in particular.

Thanks, Matt. I’m not surprised that a contraction in high school graduates probably isn’t the source of the problem, given that primary and secondary education is mandated by law in most places. Higher education isn’t, so it’s important that we be able to offer students something of value if we’re to keep the enrollments up. I worry that whereas a college degree was viewed as a means for social and personal betterment in previous generations, it just isn’t perceived to offer that value to students today; at least, not outside of specialized disciplines whose practitioners require domain-specific knowledge and training.

It’s also possible that the expansion of higher education since the second world war was driven by unsustainable (or at least unsustained) forces, and that the contraction we’re seeing now is a corrective. That would be a shame, as I think we can all agree that there’s something inherently valuable in the kind of study that characterizes higher education (at least as an ideal). It benefits a country’s citizens to take advantage of that opportunity. The question is, will we be able to communicate this value in a way that leads people to seek higher education as a source for satisfying it? Or will people look to sources outside of academia to fill that need?

I just learned about an organization in Helena, Montana called Merlin CCC, run by Marisa Diaz-Waian, who has an M.A. in philosophy. They host regular philosophically themed gatherings and community outings. I look forward to seeing what they’re up to when I go back home this summer. Interesting times!

Thanks. This was a good read, if depressing. The similarities between Shippensburg University and St. Cloud State University are striking: both were created as normal schools (colleges that trained teachers), the former in 1871 and the latter in 1869. And similar to St. Cloud, according to the article student enrollments at Shippensburg dropped from 8,326 in 2010/11 to 5,668 last year.

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. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. 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. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”

Among the small number of elite colleges and research universities — think the Princetons and the Penn States — the cliff will be no big deal. These institutions have their pick of applicants and can easily keep classes full.

For everyone else, the consequences could be dire. In some places, the crisis has already begun. 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. Starved of students and the tuition revenue they bring, small private colleges in New England have begun to blink off the map. Regional public universities like Ship are enduring painful layoffs and consolidation.

The timing is terrible. Trade policy, de-unionization, corporate consolidation, and substance abuse have already ravaged countless communities, particularly in the post-industrial Northeast and Midwest. In many cases, colleges have been one of the only places that provide good jobs in their communities, offer educational opportunities for locals, and have strong enough roots to stay planted. The enrollment cliff means they might soon dry up and blow away.

This trend will accelerate the winner-take-all dynamic of geographic consolidation that is already upending American politics. College-educated Democrats will increasingly congregate in cities and coastal areas, leaving people without degrees in rural areas and towns. For students who attend less-selective colleges and universities near where they grew up — that is, most college students — the enrollment cliff means fewer options for going to college in person, or none at all.

The empty factories and abandoned shopping malls littering the American landscape may soon be joined by ghost colleges, victims of an existential struggle for reinvention, waged against a ticking clock of shrinking student bodies, coming soon to a town near you.