Posted on 10/28/2026 6:46:15 AM PDT by karpov
Several years ago, when I headed marketing at a major public university, a colleague suggested we needed our own “moonshot” to stem the tide of declining enrollment.
I took the question seriously, given the catastrophic demographic “cliff” American higher education will soon endure, and then offered up the kind of moonshot I’m sure he didn’t expect. Namely, a national campaign funded by the higher education industry to encourage the growth of families and reverse the baby dearth that has left the U.S. procreating below replacement levels. This was no doubt a long-term strategy, and quite an expensive one at that, but one that might ultimately reverse the systemic decline in what has become an increasingly mature-to-declining industry.
In an ideologically polarized country, implementing this would be harder than President Kennedy’s actual moonshot more than sixty years ago. Recent data indicate that higher education will peak this year at 3.9 million students before declining more than 13 percent by 2041. Yet, my idea was not taken seriously, thereby spotlighting the challenge one faces in having a serious, forward-looking discussion about higher education marketing.
The enrollment cliff is the most predictable event of the past 20 years in higher education, yet administrators treat it as an unalterable matter of faith. The ideological orthodoxy dominating college campuses frames cataclysmic climate change as a reason not to have children, and reproductive freedom as an absolute, unalloyed good with no downsides. Consequently, many in the professoriate and on senior university staff view family propagation as an assault on Planet Earth rather than a positive propagation of humanity—or a practical way to keep tenured faculty in their jobs for the foreseeable future.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
Let the 3rd worlders keep population growing! That’ll do it and make the world a better place.
I hope that was sarcasm.
There is one industry in America that has never experienced a real recession, much less a depression, that resulted in the type of consolidation and reorganization that goes on in the private sector all the time. And that industry is higher education. University deans and professors may scoff at the idea that they are a business but they are. And as an industry, they need a good recession that results in bankruptcies and consolidation. Too many useless degrees that cost too much. Too many useless professors. Too many administrators. There needs to be a lot of firings and consolidation into what works. And we will get the added benefit of a couple years of complete meltdowns by the Woke professors who get fired and have to find real jobs.
Yeah, the globalists really thought they’d flood the U.S. with turd worlders who would walk on the “magic dirt” here and suddenly be able to run and maintain a modern system.
Take out the NEPO/legacy sons and daughters of 'elites' who start at $80.000 a year at Daddy's firm - and then way up from there - and the difference isn't so great. Hunter Biden was making $80,000 a MONTH in Ukraine with his college degree... but it was all 'daddy' money. Same with prep school commies - money and daddy all the way.
A friend said, “That’s so stupid only a college professor would believe it.” That one sentence encapsulated what I’d realized about college. The whole college ecology is like a hothouse flower business. Let the outside air in and the whole thing would die under its own weight. (I think I mixed metaphors but go with me for minute.)
A recent study where they used AI instructors and put a group of students thus trained against the same training in Harvard proved the AI trained students did statistically better. The whole college experience is not worth it. When I was hiring the students coming out of college had few useable skills. We still had to spend one to three years training engineers for what we actually needed.
I think traditional college needs to be scrapped. It was essentially ruined by government subsidies that allowed everyone, whether qualified or not, to attend. It’s time to start over from scratch.
Just for grins, I asked Claude:
If you took all the endowments at US Universities what would that add up to?
Searched the web
Roughly $1 trillion.
The best count comes from the annual NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments. Respondents to the most recent survey reported a collective endowment size of $944.3 billion as of June 30, 2025, up from the $878.2 billion reported for FY24. That survey covers 657 colleges, universities, and education-related foundations, not every school in the country. The US has a few thousand degree-granting institutions, but the ones left out are mostly small, so including them would likely push the total just past $1 trillion. The figure as of mid-2026 will be higher, since endowments have kept growing, but that survey hasn’t been published yet.
sitecorecloud
sitecorecloud
The money is very concentrated:
The top schools hold most of it. Endowments valued at over $5 billion grew 11.8% during fiscal 2025. Those 30 endowments represented 58.2% of the total value of all endowments studied.
highereddive
The biggest individual endowments at the end of FY25 were Harvard at $55.67 billion, Yale at $44.15 billion, and Stanford at $40.79 billion.
voxbooster
The typical school has far less. The median endowment was $253.6 million, and more than one-quarter of study participants had endowments of $100 million or less.
institutionalinvestor
For scale, schools withdrew $33.4 billion from their endowments during fiscal year 2025, which works out to about 3.5% of the total. Most of that money is restricted by donors to specific purposes. Nearly half (47.4%) of endowment spending went to student aid in fiscal 2025.
You are correct. Also, the cost is obscenely high and unnecessary. We would get new pharmacists right out of school owing 150k in student loans. Then we had to train them for the real world of hospital pharmacy. That obscene cost is totally unnecessary. 70% of those classes could be taught online. The labs and rotations in a clinical setting are essential and cannot be done online.
The universities have no motive to cut costs.
Colleges don’t teach liberal arts any longer. They teach progressive arts.
Here’s the difference: liberal arts are what a person should know to succeed to life, esp., in a dynamic, liberal, democratic society. The liberal arts includes a knowledge base and the ability to think for oneself.
Progressive arts is how a person should ass-kiss the ruling elites. For example, there’s no difference between men and women.
As it is, the so-called liberal arts of today are imploding. Majors are very far down.
Most students in so-called liberal arts courses are forced to take indoctrination courses because they’re worked into the core curriculum. The so-called liberal arts of today are mostly the price you have to pay - a kind of tax - to enter engineering and medicine and other STEMH disciplines.
An increasing percentage of young women is becoming unattractive as a mate to normal heterosexual men with traditional values.
Yup—if colleges/universities had wise long term aspirations they would train young women on how to become outstanding wives and mothers.
Instead they teach the exact opposite.
It is their funeral.
Too fratty?
Ban federally backed collage loans, and make those loans able to be discharged by bankruptcy. that alone will fix half the issue.
Like anything the Democrats touch, most of these jobs are BS to keep their tools from starving on the streets.
Perfect.
Use the money to pay down college loans.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.