That's already hitting - the incoming class of 2023 (matriculating 2019) is the first cohort born since 9/11, and is tiny. A number of colleges are facing bankruptcy because there just aren't enough students to go around. And it'll only get worse. Birth rates were depressed from 2001-2009, but they fell off a cliff after 2009.
The debt load on young people is greater than the cost of raising a child to adulthood. By the time it is paid off, the urge to procreate has gone.
And those who turned baby-raisin' into a soulless, for-profit industry can choke on their sins, too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2019/10/21/downfall-...
Fertility rates by year in U.S:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Births per year:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-...
I was wrong about the start date, BTW. I'd thought that fertility started dropping after 9/11 (which also roughly coincides with the children of the 70s having kids instead of baby boomers, a smaller cohort), but it really didn't peak until 2007-2008. Then there's a double-whammy: there are fewer women of childbearing age (coinciding with Gen-Xers born in the 70s and early Millenials), and the fertility rate among women who are of childbearing age has fallen off a cliff. Births are down about 15% since 2007; when you think about what that means for a typical classroom (where you might've had 24 kids, now you might have 20), that's pretty huge.
Although that chart doesn't capture the ratio of women of fertile age in each year, so there may be an unforeseen cliff.
Side note: I remember being shocked the first time I found out that baby boomers and ‘the aging population issue’ weren’t actually global issues and only affected the counties who took the spoils post WW2 (aka western powerhouse countries).
Lots of other counties have very different population ages mixes for example Ireland and Turkey.
The only continent that still has fertility rates above replacement is Africa:
https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
There's a lot of parents whom children are in high school now that already went through the student loan debt cycle so we should start seeing the effects of that soon.
Perhaps we'll see a rise in trade/vocational school as a result.
I think the stigma of not going to college is changing a lot (for the better) or at least in the programming world it seems that way.
I suppose going the private route would just result in different contacts. I also benefit from colleagues from previous employment.
I made it through relatively okay because STEM and some scholarships, but I'm not even sure I'll recommend my children go to college. Especially with online courses (not talking about college, just courses) becoming more viable and useful.
I definitely won't for some pursuits, like art. I'd rather they live at home with me for four years, doing self-study and putting their art out there online and developing a following rather than spend $200,000+ on college that will likely not result in anything afterwards (hell, as a semi-professional game designer myself, I'd happily work with them to get their art into published games).