The Enrollment Cliff and the Missing Babies: Who Wasn’t Born?
Today’s post is paywalled courtesy of coin flips. It’s a bit different than. normal, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about regarding declining fertility and higher education. Enjoy! And consider becoming a paying subscriber!
Introduction
I’ve been working on a project related to fertility for several years now with my two old friends and patient coauthors Christine Durrance and Melanie Guldi, both of whom are health economists and demographers. Melanie in particular has a paper with Kasey Buckles and Lucie Schmidt in the Journal of Human Resources that focuses on what they call the “baby-less recovery” from the Great Recession. For our paper, I one day made a picture of fertility over time and was pretty stunned to see this complete reversal in trend — fertility rates rising until 2007, then falling off a cliff. So I’ve been thinking ever since about Melanie’s paper, as well as what I hear about regularly in higher ed regarding a coming enrollment cliff.
I probably have been so curious about this in part because my youngest daughter was born in 2007 and started college this year. Which means her birth cohort is the last “large cohort” and every subsequent birth cohort will be smaller. Which just had me thinking about the hypothesized enrollment cliff in a personalized way regarding my daughter and my university. And that kept me bouncing around Melanie’s work with Kasey and Lucie just wondering to myself — I wonder who the marginal kid is in this downturn?
So let me tell you about what Buckles, Guldi, and Schmidt found, because I think it has implications that people aren’t talking about.
The Baby-less Recovery
