It was a grim forecast for the State System of Higher Education – and higher education as a whole – at a hearing of the State Senate Majority Policy Committee. Nathan Grawe, an economics professor at Carleton College, told the committee that with the population declining and fewer high school graduates to recruit, the universities can’t “stay on autopilot and (not) change what (they) do.”
With State System enrollment down four percent again this year, and eight straight years of declines, committee chairman Senator David Argall outlined the problem, “This drop now means that our state system of universities will educate fewer than 100,000 students for the first time since 2003.”
Senator Gene Yaw summed up the gloomy forecast for universities, saying they have to change the way they are operating. “… you either eliminate some schools, which I would assume unfortunately somewhere in the United States that’s going to happen. Or they have to reduce them in size if they’re all going to still stay open and share a small population.”
Grawe told the committee that the schools need to change their recruiting to focus on getting students with backgrounds they might have rejected in the past, including those with poorer grades than they may have accepted. Still, he said, with the declining population overall, that means there will be even fewer high school graduates. He said you can’t recruit students who haven’t been born. Grawe forecast a fifteen percent decline in enrollment by 2035.
