The Demographic Cliff

that's going to have a profound impact on  higher education in the United States. And for quite a bit of time, I just felt like it may  just be scare mongering, because I hadn't really looked at the data directly myself, and it almost  seemed as though it might just be an excuse for structural change in higher education, a way to  justify changes people already wanted. But then I decided to dig a little bit deeper, and I saw  that there is some pretty profound change coming,

especially in particular regions of the US. So in  the northeast and in the midwest in particular, we're seeing a lot of internal migration to the  south and to the west, and a lot of urbanization that is kind of hollowing out rural areas  that play host to a lot of these smaller, tuition-dependent higher education institutions  that really put them in a vulnerable position. So, in this study, you're comparing the  US experience with that of Korea and

Japan. Could you talk about why you selected  Korea and Japan as a basis for comparison? Sure, absolutely. So there were really two major  reasons why I decided to go with Korea and Japan. One is that they've already experienced this  phenomenon. It's been going on there already, and so it's an opportunity to kind of peek  into the future of what it might look like further down along the line, and the types of  things we might want to prepare for before this

is upon us. And then the other reason is just  because I spent so much time there, a good 7, 8, 9 years in Korea working in higher education,  and I realized that a lot of the things I was hearing here kind of echoed what I was hearing  at faculty meetings and in press releases at my former institutions, since it kind of tickled  something inside me like, wait a minute, I've heard this before, and it inspired me to go  and look back at exactly what had been going on.

You kind of mentioned that Korea and Japan  have been dealing with these issues for a bit of time. What was their experience like?  Were those institutions closing? merging?

Well, I mean, they're still dealing with it now.  They haven't really solved the issue of a very low birth rate, and the impact that it's had on  higher education has primarily been a push towards mergers, and that, I think, has been facilitated  by a number of environmental characteristics in those places that is helpful and conducive to  the merger of higher education institutions,

just because they're much more dense in terms of  the population distribution. There isn't nearly as much land as there is here, and very large  populations, and so even with population decline or population aging in certain areas, there's  still a relatively large number of people within a certain range around particular institutions.  And so mergers become much more feasible, because if there isn't enough to support two  institutions, if we bring them together and make

one, we should be able to get by. And so, yeah,  I would say mergers by far have been the most common response in both Korea and Japan. Though  Korea has had its fair share of closures as well. In your paper, you talk a little bit  about the types of mergers that were occurring in Korea and Japan. Can  you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that there were  some characteristics that help to allow these mergers to go forward, and one of them is some  of the patterns that we see in ownership of the higher education institutions in Korea and Japan,  because there was such a boom in higher education not so long ago, like in the past 50 years, a  lot of these institutions are actually owned by similar groups or similar individuals or  families, and so they would successfully

establish a four-year institution and then want to  open a polytechnic or a trade school of some kind, or what we would call a community college,  but there would be called a junior college, and that made it very easy. If the same  group of people own both institutions and they realize both are struggling, well,  we'll cut out some of the overhead costs

by merging these together. And there was also  some policies in place from the government that sort of pushed these institutions to do this as  well, because the governments in both Korea and Japan wanted to preserve a certain amount of  stability in their higher education systems to prevent what people might perceive as collapse,  and so there was a kind of gradual, gentle pressure to merge institutions over time that  seemed to be helpful towards getting this done.

So what are some of the factors  that affected the likelihood of institutions in Korea or Japan  to survive these demographic shifts? I would say that the major sort of elements  that played into whether or not an institution

The other was the focus, four-year institutions  tended to be all right. They tended to do okay, because what we started to see in Korea and  Japan is that as there were fewer and fewer people applying for admission, it was easier  to get a position at a four-year institution, and that a lot of these two-year institutions were  almost overflow in the past, where they would take on students who had wanted to go to a four-year  institution but weren't able to get admission,

and so they settled for a two-year option  before moving into the workforce. But now, because there weren't as many students applying,  institutions were more willing to take on these students who otherwise may have gone to a two-year  institution, which left two-year institutions really struggling to get a sufficient number  of students to be able to support themselves. And as you noted with internal migration decisions  in the US, with people moving to the south and

west and moving away from rural areas, we're  already seeing some colleges being hit. What are some of the ways in which US colleges have dealt  with this, or perhaps failed to deal with this? I would say that the institutions tend  to take three different sort of outlooks to this issue or this problem of demographic  cliff that they see coming. Some institutions are trying to really cut back to reduce  costs, and they use it to justify changes

they make at their institutions, which can be  unsettling to faculty. I've seen, for example, programs merge or programs close where even  tenured faculty have lost their positions as a result of this sort of hard-nosed approach  that's being adopted by some administrations, and then it's justified through the need for  cost cutting in anticipation of these changes that are going to be coming to the institution.  Another approach is a sort of like plug your ears

and whistle. Some institutions have just really  been kind of hoping for the best in the long run, and this might have an impact on others,  but it's not going to have an impact on us,

and they're just kind of going forward with  business as usual. And if the reputation of the institution is strong enough, then they are  likely to come out all right in the end, because while there might be some displacement in terms of  who had gone there before and who goes there now, in the end, their situation isn't going to change  that much from what they've experienced in the past. And so it's understandable why they would  kind of take this sort of rose colored glasses

approach to the situation. And then finally,  we're starting to see some institutions who realize that they're going to need to change,  but they're not exactly sure how. And so they're kind of preparing themselves to be able to  change. They're communicating out to faculty, to staff, and to administrators, that there  are challenges coming at us, and we're going to

need to be able to make some changes to how we do  things. And so they're starting to instigate, for example, new thinking about how programs should  change and how the structure of the institution might need to change, and really encouraging,  internally, people to prepare themselves for doing something different so that they can survive  in a new environment. And so I would say that's sort of the third approach, the getting ready  approach. The first is really all about cutting,

the second is, “Just forget about it. It'll be  okay,” and the third kind of priming the pump, if you will, for future change that is going to  need to happen in higher education institutions. You noted there are some landscape  differences between the US and Korea and Japan in terms of population  density and literally the amount of land in different spaces. But can  you talk about what we can learn from the experiences in Korea and Japan and  ways that we might move forward here?

So I came into this thinking that there would be  clear takeaways, but instead it left me feeling a little nervous about the situation in the  United States, because in Korea and Japan, you had a highly interested government that  was pretty deeply involved in maintaining the stability of higher education, whereas in  the United States, the government is much more

remotely involved. They're not really directly  getting into the nitty gritty of the provision of higher education within the country, they're  only really indirectly a part of what's going on. And the good will that we see between higher  education in Korea and Japan and the government doesn't really exist here to that same extent.  And so we don't have someone looking after us… …like a safety net….

…yeah, a safety net. And so the government  in Korea and Japan, they created policies to make mergers more smooth, and they would use  Ministry of Education reviews of higher education institutions to make adjustments to quotas for  students at institutions to reduce the impact of demographic decline across the board, so that  was more shared, but also so that institutions that scored lower on ministry reviews of their  institution, or institutions they believed to

have a lower quality were kind of cut off over  time from this pool of students, so that there was a gradual change as time went on. But we  don't really have that here. It's much more… it's a free market, and people go where they want  to go, and that can be really destructive, and it can bring a lot of change from one year to the  next year, where institutions expect something,

and then all of a sudden they just don't have  enough students to keep going on. And so the other sort of element of it is that there's a  positive public opinion of higher education in Korea and Japan, the sense that it's a public  good that we need, that we can't live without, and I feel like people are questioning that here  in the United States, and so we don't have that

same level of public goodwill to rely on as  well. The one exception to that that I have is that there's a strong connection between  alumni and the institutions that come from here in the United States. So we do see some cases  where alumni are sort of riding into the rescue, like Sweet Briar College, where alumni came  together and donated to keep the institution open, to prevent it from closing. And so we do see  some of that grassroots support coming from

people who have a personal connection to the  institutions. But I would say that that's going to be the exception, rather than the rule. It's  just, I mean, alumni, you can only ask so much.

Yeah, that's great news. When I was reading  your article, I was like, “Oh, yeah, okay…” One way of addressing this, and many institutions  have been, is that we've had a lot of underserved populations in the US, people from low income  communities, people who are first-generation college students and students from historically  underrepresented groups have much lower college attendance rates, and this is a period of time  when the rate of return to higher education

is the highest we've ever seen in the US. But  there may also be some political issues there, because in order to bring in some groups from  lower income households, it does require larger amounts of subsidies, and we're not seeing that  same sort of increase. In this political climate, do you see that as being very likely as  perhaps a way of expanding the reach of higher education and perhaps improving our  rates of intergenerational income mobility?

Yeah, I would say one of the unique sort of  opportunities available to us here in the United States is the fact that we have these  large pools of people who maybe traditionally haven't taken part in higher education, and  as a result of which we can kind of cater to bringing in new people into higher ed, bringing  in first-generation students, and it's good for institutions because they can better respond to  the fact that they don't have as many applicants

as they had in the past, or they don't have  as many students as they had in the past, and it allows them to support themselves. And it's  good for the students, because, as you mentioned, it opens doors economically to new sort of  opportunities available within the US economy and different lifestyles within different  social classes. And so I would say that, yeah, absolutely, that there is this unique  opportunity here in the United States,

but there are certainly challenges. The programs  that are designed to help us with retention and to making adjustments to the way that we do  things in higher education to be more responsive to the needs of students who are coming from a  first-generation background are the very programs that are under threat now with the change that  we've seen politically within the United States.

And so this lifeline that we had is at  real risk now because all of the effort that we've put into making higher education a  more open and welcoming place to people coming from backgrounds that traditionally didn't  take part in higher education may feel less welcome as a result of a lot of these programs  being shut down. In fact, I'm working on a study now on the impact of DEI programs having  been made illegal in the state of Texas,

and how that's impacted the student experience  there. And so I'm very interested to see what sort of results we get from that study. But I have  a feeling that it's not going to be all good news. One of the other areas for potential  enrollment growth that's been discussed quite a bit in the US is the admission of  more international students. There's a lot of desire for international students to get  US education, but you note that the political

climate has become less welcoming. What's  the future of this looking like right now? And this wasn't true, not just in the US, but  also Korea and Japan sought to attract more international students. They saw it as a potential  way to respond to declining numbers of domestic students and provide support to institutions, and  some institutions were quite successful in being

able to draw international students. I wouldn't  say that higher education across the board really succeeded in Korea and Japan, but there were some  key institutions that really excelled at this, and it became a niche for them that allowed  them to sort of weather the storm. Here in the United States, I would say that we've  always been a top choice destination for

international students around the world. And so  it's pretty clear that we could rely on this, or it was pretty clear we could rely on this in  the past, but what we've seen is that there was kind of an unfortunate mix of developments that  occurred within the country that have made us less attractive as a destination. The first of which  that comes to mind would be just COVID-19 really tarnished the image of the United States, just  in the response and in a sense of sort of chaos

that students felt while they were here in the  United States. That they communicated back home, a sense of lawlessness, almost in the country,  that this is a place where people don't follow the rules and where there isn't sort of  a clear, organized response to issues or problems as they emerge, and that was very  bad for U.S. higher education, just because that type of damage to a country's image is  very difficult to come back from. It lingers.

It's almost generational change when people  shift in their view of a particular country, and so that plays into decisions around where  to go to study. And then the other you sort of alluded to is political change, and I don't think  it's as simple as just a shift in administration, but we've witnessed in the public discourse a  real change in how people talk and think about people who are coming to the United States  from other countries, and people feel that,

they feel that they hear it in the discourse.  And you know when you're not welcome, you know you're visiting someone's house, and you  hear them talking about you in the kitchen, and they're not saying nice things, unless you really,  really want to be there, you're just less likely to stick around. And I think that that has really  contributed as well to this decline we're seeing

in the numbers of international students who have  come to the United States. And so again, there's always going to be institutions that because due  to their reputation or due to their location,

are still going to draw on a large number of  students. But it's not going to be a safety net for institutions who are most vulnerable to this  decline, places that are located in rural areas or who are specialized in a particular academic area,  or institutions that are very small, these are the places that are the least likely to attract  international students, and so it's just not a good solution, or it's not the solution that many  had hoped that it would be, at least at this time.

One other thing you talk about in your  paper a little bit is shifting the focus of the course offerings and the focus  of the programs offered by institutions. Can you talk a little bit about how  that's been done in Korea and Japan, and whether institutions here are already starting  to do this a bit, and perhaps, might that be a way of maintaining the relevance and the strength of  a larger proportion of higher ed institutions?

I think institutions are still trying to figure  out how they can change the curriculum to make them fit into the society that we live in.  And we see pressure on institutions coming from the labor market and then from this  new discourse around accountability for institutions in terms of student outcomes in the  labor market. And it makes me a little nervous,

to be honest. I'm not sure that it's necessarily  a good thing, and in Korea, at least, I don't know about this as much in Japan, but in Korea, we saw  things like funding for our departments being tied to the percentage of students who were full-time  employed with benefits a certain amount of time after graduation, and that funding levels for  departments would shift to the point that even positions could go away. If you cannot provide  successful employment outcomes for students,

then the justification for that program or  for those positions might go away. And so that created a lot of discomfort among faculty  and among administrators who really felt the squeeze in terms of everything we do has to  be targeted in some way to a particular job, and we need to be preparing students in  some way for work. Everything we do has to be focused on getting students ready for  work. And I think that that's disruptive and

not helpful for higher education. I think that  those things are absolutely very important, but that they fly in the face of the mission  of a lot of higher education institutions, and that there's a real danger of losing touch  with the original purpose of these institutions. And so I would say that I think I much more  appreciate the efforts to just prepare people for change without necessarily knowing which direction  we're going to be headed, because otherwise, some

of this is quite disruptive and it's destructive  as well. It makes me a little bit nervous. Given your experience, what  role do you see faculty playing in shaping the future  change that needs to come? Well, in some places, we are seeing faculty  taking a more proactive role in creating new

programs and to creating even new schools. So I  don't know if you've heard much about, I believe it's Arizona State University, they have, like a  School of Ocean Futures and some pretty new sort of ways of organizing what the programs that  are available at the institution with a clear focus on the future. So that they're hopeful  that students that come out of these programs

are able to find a place in the future world, at  least as they envision it. And so I think faculty members who sort of take the lead in this work  and help to sort of reorganize higher education around what might be needed in the future, they  have a role to play there if they're able to do that. But in a lot of cases, faculty members are  very resistant to any sort of change, and so,

in fact, they've kind of become antagonists to  any of this work. And I understand that. Higher education looked a certain way for a very  long time, and that's what people sort of envision it’s going to continue to look like in  the future, and they are cynical about any sort of changes that others are trying to impose  on higher education, and maybe rightly so. And one of the ways, I think that we've seen  that in the wider universe of colleges and

universities is gutting some of the traditional  liberal arts departments and majors. We've seen some schools give up music departments or  give up art departments, or art history, or sometimes seriously cutting back on history  or math and other areas. I gather that that's something you probably would not advocate  for as part of this transition to the future.

Liberal arts institutions are the greatest threat  is the reality of it. So the institutions that we've seen closing in the Northeast in particular  have been small liberal arts institutions, and so I am very much in favor of the mission  of these liberal arts institutions, personally. But if people aren't going because that's not  what they're looking for in higher education,

then the problem we have isn't with the programs  we're offering. There's a program with what people perceive as being valuable in the society and  how social values have changed over time, that people aren't interested in learning about music  and they're not interested in learning art, and that's, to me, is terrifying, but it's the reality  of what we're seeing in terms of demand is that people want this very clear economic benefit as a  result of attending higher education, and if they

don't see a clear one-to-one correlation, that  they tend to be more dismissive of it as something that's not necessary or something that they  don't need, which creates a lot of this pressure,

and it's used to justify things like gutting out  some of these programs like you mentioned. I think higher education has grown dangerously sort of  disconnected from public life, and that people see higher education institutions as something  that's very removed and something that's stuck in the past and something that isn't really tied to  sort of public opinion and the public discourse, and that puts us in such a dangerous position, and  so that really, really makes me worry about the

future for higher education, because there isn't a  clear vision about where do we fit in the society of the future, what role do we play? And we're  becoming increasingly vestigial, almost, in the way that people talk about and think about higher  education, in a way that leaves me very worried. That seems like the critical difference too, that  you identified in your study, really between the differences between Korea and Japan too,  right? Is that really how it played out?

And even at a personal level, I could feel the  difference working in higher education as a faculty member in South Korea. In society, I was  awarded a certain amount of respect from anybody who learned that I was a professor or a faculty  member, and people would seek out my opinion or seek out my participation in programs in a way  that I just don't see here in the United States.

In a way, when people learn I'm a professor  in the United States, their response is very different from in Korea, and that was sort of a  warning bell for me in terms of, this is how they see higher education here. It's very different  from what I had experienced in other settings. And on that cheery note… you had mentioned the  shift out of the Midwest and the Northeast into

other regions of the country. So what types of  differences do you see between the experience of the Midwest and the New England region  in terms of the response to these shifts?

So I would say that the sort of the major  difference that we see between the Northeast and the Midwest is that in the northeast, there  were more successful mergers, and that has to do with the fact that there is less distance between  institutions in the northeast, it is a little bit more densely populated, and so oftentimes  the institutions that were having trouble were able to reach out to neighboring institutions,  especially smaller institutions, would reach out

to larger neighboring institutions, and they were  able to come to some sort of agreement where they

would merge. There's one exception to this in the  Northeast, where two similarly sized institutions, neither of which were struggling, this was Berklee  College of Music and then the Boston Conservatory, they just spoke with each other and decided we  should share these overhead costs that we're dealing with, and we'll become one music  institution within Boston, and otherwise, it tended to be smaller institutions that were  struggling reaching out to larger neighbors

and getting some help and becoming a part of that  larger neighbor. And oftentimes they would fill in sort of an area of relative weakness within that  larger institution. Something that comes to mind, for example, is Wheelock College joining Boston  University and becoming sort of the specialized college in education and human services within  Boston University. And so there were some pretty

happy stories there about mergers working  out. It was more remote, small liberal arts institutions in the Northeast that were the most  likely to close, and that contrasted a little with the eastern Midwest, where a lot of the times  we saw religious affiliated institutions were the ones that were struggling. There were quite a few  Christian colleges that weren't able to find a way

forward. And in terms of the mergers that we saw,  they tended to be highly specialized institutions that were sort of gobbled up by neighbors that  didn't have a program or any offerings in that area, and saw it as an opportunity to expand  out what they offered at their institutions. So the stories were pretty similar, but there  were some differences in terms of the success rate of mergers and the types of institutions  that were struggling in those different regions.

Well, with all that good news today,  we always end by asking, what's next? This was a very, sort of a zoomed out look at  what's going on here in the United States. And I think that there's some real value in taking a  closer look at the stories of these institutions, those that do end up closing and then those  that are able to make it through. And so I'm hoping to do a series of comparative  case studies looking at institutions

around the Northeast. There's even one  that's quite close to us here in Aurora, New York. I think it's Well’s and so I'm  hoping to take a closer look at some of these institutions and their stories but haven't  decided the exact sort of focus I want to take. But part of me wants to look at the impact on  the local economies of places that do close.

What's the sort of impact that we're seeing on  the people that live around the places where these institutions used to be located, and the  places that do succeed, what role did their relationships to their local community play in  their ability to kind of make it through and so I’m still in the brainstorming phase there, but  this is something I've been thinking about doing.

Well, thank you. This has been such a cheery  conversation, but it's one that all institutions have to address, because we are going to be  coming up to some really challenging times, and if higher ed institutions are to survive,  they're going to have to be a little bit creative and maybe more flexible in terms of addressing  the changing environment in which we're living. But studies such as this, though, can perhaps  give us more information about what paths

have been successful. So thank you, and we're  looking forward to hearing your future studies. Thank you, and thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for the zoomed out look. I think  that's helpful for everyone to get a good grasp on what the landscape really looks like and  how it does compare to some other places. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please  subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service.  To continue the conversation,

join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com.  Music by Michael Gary Brewer.