MARKET TESTS HAVE STEEP GRADING CURVES.

Put another way, see, I told you so!

For the two decades of Cold Spring Shops posts, one message that I have stayed on almost obsessively is higher education going wrong by offering a sub-prime product.  I've come to the conclusion that the U.S. News problem exists in part because parents and students recognize much of higher education is a sham.

Now, dear reader, the shake-out is under way.

[T]he austerity in state universities that accompanied the shakeout of the unionized oligopoly industries that paid the taxes was an opportunity to raise admission standards and downsize the student body concomitantly with the faculty. That is not what happened. Just pick any month of my posts and read about it.

What might have happened, instead, is the revelation of the regional comprehensive universities as the stroads of higher education.  "The challenge for the state institutions in keeping up their perceived quality is two-fold. Administrators would like to put the failures to keep up on stingy legislatures, ignoring their own complicity whenever beer-'n-circus or access-assessment-remediation-retention crowds out calculus and statistics and economics and chemistry."

Or so the faculty and staff of Western Illinois University in Macomb might be learning.

At Western Illinois University, an empty dorm that once held 800 students is now a police training ground, where active-shooter drills have left behind overturned furniture, rubber-tipped bullets and paintball casings.

Nearby dorms have been razed to weedy fields. Two more dorms are set to close this summer. Frat houses and homes once filled with student renters are empty lots. City streets used to be so crowded during the semester that cars moved at a crawl. No more.

“It’s almost like you’re watching the town die,” said Kalib McGruder, who was born in Macomb and worked 28 years for the Western Illinois campus police department.

Macomb is at the heart of a new Rust Belt: Across the U.S., colleges are faltering and so are the once booming towns around them. Enrollment is down at many of the nation’s public colleges and universities, widening the gap between high-profile campuses and struggling schools. Starting next year, there will be fewer high-school graduates for the foreseeable future.

The fallout extends to downtown Macomb. Sullivan Taylor Coffee House, located in the corner of a stately 130-year-old building not far from campus, sits mostly empty during the semester. Owner Brandon Thompson has cashed out retirement savings, hit the limits of his credit cards, even canceled his home internet to keep the doors open.

Once upon a time, that might have been an opportunity for the regional comprehensives to recognize they were in the same business as the Ivies.  The Ivies, however, are destroying their value proposition.  "Nine years ago, the Ivies might have been able to get away with their foolishness, while institutions not so venerated bore the consequences of breaking the social contract."  That post also quoted Nate Silver, "The Ivy League and other elite private colleges are losing esteem — and they deserve it."

To an extent, the troubles in Macomb reflect changing demographics and perhaps a new tone in Washington.

Among metropolitan areas especially reliant on higher education, three-quarters of them suffered weaker economic growth between 2011 and 2023 than the U.S. as a whole, according to an analysis by Mark Muro and Shriya Methkupally at Brookings Metro, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C.

In the prior decade, most of these same metro areas grew faster than the nation did.

“It’s just been one financial crisis after another for the past 15 or 17 years,” said Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges and a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. “It starts to accumulate in smaller college towns, especially for colleges that don’t have billions of dollars in the bank.”

College towns are now threatened by federal-funding cuts from the Trump administration, resulting in hiring freezes and layoffs at Ivy League and state schools alike. Administration efforts to cancel student visas might hurt state college budgets, since most international students pay higher, out-of-state tuition.

Even worse, the number of students graduating from American high schools is expected to start falling next spring, after reaching a record high this year. In 2007, the number of U.S. births peaked at 4.3 million and has been falling almost every year since.

It's the regional comprehensives, though, rather than the state flagship institutions, that are bearing the brunt of the shakeout.

Large flagship universities—blessed with strong academic reputations and high-profile sports programs—continue to boost local economies. In such cities as Ann Arbor, Mich., University of Michigan, Madison, Wis., University of Wisconsin, and Gainesville, Fla., University of Florida, students fill dorms, restaurants and bars.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of 748 public four-year colleges and universities in all 50 states shows that full- and part-time enrollment at the most prominent state universities increased 9% in 2023 compared with 2015. At lesser-known regional state universities, enrollment fell 2%. The shift represents tens of thousands of students who have abandoned struggling college towns.

At the University of Tennessee Knoxville, the state’s flagship school, enrollment jumped 30% in 2023 compared with 2015. Enrollment at Tennessee’s 10 regional state colleges fell a combined 3% over the same period. In Wisconsin, enrollment at the University of Wisconsin in Madison jumped 16% and fell 9% at regional public campuses over the same period. Between 2011 and 2023, the economies of the metropolitan areas that include Madison and Knoxville grew faster than the U.S. as a whole.

Take your pick, stronger academics or better beer-'n-circus.  Enrollments remain strong at the flagship campus in Urbana, but Western have been in retrenchment mode for half a century.  That's reality elsewhere in the sector as well.  "Demography is part of destiny; deconstructing your value proposition in the name of the Modern Language Association is a choice."  Or, in attempting to be comprehensive in the sense of an honors program to the strong students, academic assistance for the weak students, and a sports program occasionally strong in the Missouri Valley, having no value proposition at all.