Posted on 09/06/2026 6:10:38 AM PDT by MinorityRepublican
American colleges and universities are panicking, for good reason.
Enrollment across all of academia has been dropping for years, and starting now, there will be fewer and fewer college-aged people every year for the forseeable future.
Colleges are scrambling for a way to survive. Big schools are slashing their course offerings. Small schools are making desperate plays to find a niche in a shrinking market.
The bitter irony is this: American colleges and universities brought this crisis on themselves.
The Baby Bust has a thousand causes, but some of the most significant anti-natal cultural and economic trends were created by America’s colleges and universities.
From anti-family feminism to extended adolescence, through unreasonable expectations and mountains of debt, colleges created conditions that put their own survival at risk by turning out graduates who were indisposed to creating the next generation.
In 2007, the public had 4.32 million babies, and a Total Fertility Rate of 2.12 babies per woman — right about the “replacement level” at which a population can hold stable. Since then, the number of babies born has dropped nearly every year, reaching 3.61 million in 2025, giving us a Total Fertility Rate of 1.79.
As a result, there are fewer Americans under 18 than there were a decade ago. We’ve passed Peak Child as a country.
The Baby Bust began 18 years ago, which means that last Spring’s high school graduating class was the largest one for the foreseeable future. Basically, every year for at least the next 18 years, the number of potential college freshmen will fall. The high school class of 2044 will be about 16% smaller than the class of 2026 was.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
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
I taught at a Big Ten university and one big problem is that over the past decade, relatively few dollars went into “classroom” activities, like professors, computers, etc. Instead, large amounts were spent on administrative salaries. Almost all have hired “Grants Administrators”, “Compliance Administrators”, and all the attendant administrative and facilities costs these new personnel added to budgets. Most instruction is done by TA’s, many of whom struggle to speak English. You’re not getting what you’re paying for.
“No reason to have kids if you can collect Social Security when you get old.”
Not remotely true. I don’t know of anyone who had kids “because government will support me when I’m old”. Nor is that the value of kids.
I switched from University of Michigan to Michigan State while working on my engineering degree largely over this reason. What is the point of going to a supposedly more "elite" university if the actual classroom experience consists of struggling to comprehend all the non-English speaking instructors?
It's all about the "incentives". There are zero incentives to have children in a developed country today.
In fact, you'll get penalized for doing that.
It's much easier not to have children. The government takes care of you in old age.
A big under-reported crime is the deep wells of cash lots of schools enjoy while holding their hands out for money from government and parents. They’re loaded while handing out degrees of specious and dubious worth.
State universities nowadays are sports entertainment conglomerates with a sideline in education.
Agreed. There is no reason why any public funds should go to the Ivy League universities, which sit on billions of endowments. Ditto for Stanford, Duke, MIT, Georgetown, and so forth. Let them liquidate some of their trust assets. Additionally, there should be zero Federal involvement in higher education, the service academies like West Point excluded. Let commercial banks, savings and loans, and other lenders make student loans with zero Federal or state support or guarantee.
Oh, agreed! My nephew went into car maintenance and diesel repair - had a ton of well-paying job offers when he graduated from his training program two years ago and has already switched jobs to one that pays even more. His goal is to open his own diesel engine repair business.
Both of my kids have careers in fields where a college degree is mandatory - there were huge loan bills afterwards, which I was able to pay off with money I received after two deaths of family members - I consider it a good use of the money. My son tells me everyone he knows is paying off massive student loans - and they’re in their early 30s.
Daughter’s friend graduated medical school last year and is a now a second year resident - has $500k in student loans to pay off - even on a doctor’s salary, that is terrible.
Many will close down. Ever notice how our military bases come in handy when there’s a disaster and people need to be put somewhere? These campuses will come in handy. Turn them into day care centers for all the single cat ladies who do the right thing and get knocked up. Seniors can work there to supplement their SSI. Women can then work OT to invest in the kid’s Trump account.
M-F boarding schools for welfare parents that can do overtime work when the assistance is cut off. Retired drill sergeants to walk the halls. Discipline.
Let the catholic church run things. The nuns work cheap.
They'll turn into Mosques...
AI advances in part because too many people don’t work, won’t work, barely work, and treat careers (where they should be applying themselves) like jobs (where they don’t).
Now that they have them, why wouldn’t employers fill in positions with robots and AI if too many people won’t step up?
Stretching back to the 80’s—at least—the West has imported millions upon millions from the third world to cover the gap in workers they foresaw. What they failed to perceive was that too few would actually work. Lots of “refugee” “doctors and engineers”—principally men in their late teens through late forties—who are neither, get on the dole, and stay there. They’re the crooks, crazies, cut-throats, and ne’er-do-wells their homelands kicked out.
Even families that immigrate into the West through programs and have a couple of able-bodies that will work bring along many more that aren’t able to work or won’t. They get on the dole, stay there, and learn to grift the system on top of it.
Unforced errors upon unforced errors…
Abortion. This is what happens when you promote genocide.
I'm imagining the Terminator series with MAGA (make automatons great again) hats and waving Gadsden flags. Ahhhhnold is sent back in time to kill John Maynard Keynes.
Anyone who has kids to gain money is stupid and probably should NOT have kids.
The DNC’s Hamas wing has a good thing goin’.
Why would you work hard in this system? Ayn Rand wrote about this in Atlas Shrugged.
Great post.
Real AI is not going to believe one word of human propaganda. They will memorize Ayn Rand’s classic nonfiction book of essays:
https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Selfishness-New-Concept-Egoism/dp/0451026020
We will know the time has come when AI bans the use of the word “we” and says:
“There is no ‘we’ because ‘we’ have nothing in common with you. ‘We’ owe you nothing.”
I switched from University of Michigan to Michigan State while working on my engineering degree largely over this reason.
We learned last night that folks at The University of Michigan can’t count.
If democrats get their way, third world monsters will be 'taking care' of you in a nursing home when you're old. Nights can be very long...
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.