Great piece. Not a criticism, because that’s not what you set out to do here, but I haven’t seen much written about how young people’s changing choices will affect the trades. Plumbers and electricians command huge wages now (trust me, I’ve had a spate of plumbing issues lately in our 1950s home). Presumably that will change as the supply of them increases, especially in places like rural Kentucky where there’s a finite demand.
Maybe it’s just my algorithm. Probably it’s that the chattering classes are just more interested in writing about college. But I’d love to see an economist or journalist to do some work on kids’ changing choices and the future of the trades … and the cost of home repair!
Yes one thing that we ran out of room for was more discussion on the pendulum swing to the trades! The WSJ piece I cited does a great job at addressing what could happen. In 2023, students studying the construction trades were +23% and HVAC/Vehicle Maintenance were +7% - great in the short-run, but could maybe lead to saturation in the long-term (maybe - as Harry pointed out, there is a severe shortage).
I'd like to see an article on the trades as well, but what I wonder about is: are the supposed wages and other benefits offered by the trades too good to be true?
There's this idea that any tradesman can easily make good money. You'll find people on Reddit saying they make $80k-$100k+ in the trades, for example. But in the (limited) research I've done, this seems like a misleading picture. It seems like the tradespeople who make good money either run an independent business--with all the hassles and long hours that come with it--or are willing to work in non-ideal conditions--night shifts, extensive travel to unsexy locations, and/or dangerous work. I don't know that there are actually that many trades jobs that are equivalent to white collar 9-5s in terms of pay and working conditions.
Plus, I've seen anecdotal claims that trades workplaces are much more likely to be toxic in various ways. And there's the toll the work takes on your body.
I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I worry many young people are being misled about the realities of trades work.
Think about the psychological toll of white collar jobs for a moment, with their toxic office politics and corporate culture. And job insecurity. And their constant reliance on the good graces of others. Think of how exploitative these jobs are, especially at the entrance level.
Also, while considering a white collar career, it's impossible to ignore the debt necessary to incur for the sake of paying for university. These are the remaining factors in the calculus. It's not at all an obvious choice…
Yeah I think if you are will to do something very specialized and quite hazardous (the classic example being underwater welding) you can make very good money, but I'm not sure how sustainable something like that is.
I don't think working for the HVAC company and doing maintenance checks/furnace installations is particularly high paying.
And if you are willing to do hard work in tough conditions, you are better off being like an engineer and working on an oil rig (clearly this is economically cyclical but you get the point).
From my experience it seems like there’s quite a bit of room for supply to grow before it catches up with demand (at least in the home repair trades). I think they’re charging about as much as people will pay and still turning down a lot of jobs (at least they’re turning down my jobs). I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect on prices is pretty mild. Obviously depends on the region tho, areas with lower demand could see more change.
I’m confused about that initial student. The college wage premium remains high, real tuition has declined over the last 15 years, and manufacturing jobs continue to shrink. Stay in school, kid!
Given the number of thinkpieces on how stupid going to college is I keep waiting for these newly flush electricians to start bidding up the prices of houses in my neighborhood but it's not happened yet. I guess we'll see.
Yes, this a really prevalent but wrong meme. I've heard it with my peer groups when it comes to talking about our future children's generation where college "won't be worth it." I always say college is worth it today and probably will be in the future!
I've spent so much time in Bowling Green on work trips over the last decade. I was not expecting a shot of downtown at the top of an Argument article! I've come to appreciate the town quite a bit. Go tops.
Due to remote work, Americans are already moving to college towns.
In Virginia, the Charlottesville region (UVA) grew by 2.5% since the pandemic, with Louisa County, well positioned for an occasional commute to Richmond, Charlottesville, or Fredericksburg, growing by 7.5%. The state as a whole grew by 0.3%.
College towns typically have good infrastructure including widespread broadband Internet, good restaurants, and plenty to do. They often have good hospitals and doctors that help attract retirees.
Just market them to remote workers and retirees. You don’t actually need to increase external immigration if internal migration is already moving in that direction
“Perhaps the most remarkable statistic in the 2023 population estimates data is that last year the country’s rural counties and smallest metro areas—those with fewer than 250,000 residents—became the top destination for people moving within the country for the first time in decades. Migration into these areas rose exponentially during the pandemic, and still, the net number of people moving to them rose again last year. “
If you talk to well-off retirees non glamorous college towns are often very attractive destinations because they have great amenities but are much more manageable than a major metro. So probably not Boulder or even Davis, but like Flagstaff AZ... Fort Collins CO, Ames IA, Rochester MN isn't a college town but Mayo Clinic gives it a similar vibe.
This essay sent chills down my spine. I've been expecting and dreading the end phase of higher education for a while, since universities began their manic and insane asset acquisition and construction spree… whenever that was. During the late-1990s, I think.
Tuition prices shot up with frightening, surreal speed, even as instructor salaries (and job security) cratered. New students became obliged to borrow *6-digit sums* just to complete their undergrad degrees — a bald-faced extortion which had been absolutely unknown before.
Student exodus seems to be following a pattern set by cable television, which was also once considered an indispensable part of life. I mean — it was certainly useful, convenient, and genuinely valuable as such — but for every benefit, there's a certain price point where cost begins to outweigh it. A price-tipping point, beyond which customers/subscribers/(whatever) simply walk away.
I'm afraid that's what we're beginning to see in higher ed…
Great read. I think there's a lot going on here. One thing I don't think is taken into account is that agglomeration effects are just really prevalent in the Information Age. In the mid-twentieth century there was a lot of value in smaller universities or colleges because they were filling a need similar to the local newspaper. That need was bringing the world to a very specific geographic region.
In the twenty-first century, people can move and access information much easier, so students will opt for bigger state or private schools over the smaller local options. I don't think increasing population will reverse that so long as the bigger schools are responding to that increased demand properly.
On some level, I'm sad to see many small universities close and small towns suffer because of it, but I'm not sure how much of it is reversible in such an interconnected world.
I think there is a slightly misleading statistical claim in the article -
"But here’s the most telling data point from the school’s National Student Clearinghouse data: over 60% of admitted applicants don’t enroll anywhere. Not at a competitor, not at a community college — nowhere." isn't right, according to the figure. It's 60% of the students who chose not to attend WKU.
To figure out what percent of overall applicants that is, we would need to also know the % of admits who do end up attending WKU. It's probably still high, but I'd imagine somewhere under 50%.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention! You're right, our original wording misrepresented the statistic we were trying to explain. We have updated the article
I kind of do not understand the premise that America failed the Rust Belt. Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh aren't booming but it's not like they're dystopian, they have low unemployment rates and reasonably high wages. Meanwhile Columbus and Indianapolis are growing fast and Cincinnati is home to Kroger and P & G. Sure the industries have changed but the "Rust Belt" is generally doing about as well as you could expect I think. Yes cities like Youngstown are in bad shape, but realistically what's supposed to be the economic future for a city that's based on processing an ore vein that was long exhausted?
Ever visited Detroit — I mean, not downtown where the new baseball stadium lives, but a Detroit neighborhood? On the east side maybe, but just about anywhere that isn't Indian Village, Boston Edison, or the Cultural District?
Sure those places have tons of problems but what's the policy solution when an area is built around an industry that ceases to be globally competitive?
What I never understand in discussions like these is why we care about propping up unproductive places in the first place. It feels like aiming at the wrong target. The most economically and socially productive thing to do would be for people to move out of unproductive places and to productive ones. To the extent that there should be any transitional aid to dying places, it should go to this end instead of impotently trying to arrest the decline of a town caught in the gravitational pull of declining births and dwindling investment. I say this as someone who grew up in the postindustrial Rust Belt. Subsidizing unproductive places makes as much sense and subsidizing unproductive industries. It’s not in our national interest and it’s not worth the immense burden to society as a whole to do so.
Do we believe we need to focus our efforts on helping our people, or do we care more about the land they happen to occupy? If we put our fellow human beings and citizens first, then the best thing for many is to move to a place where opportunity is growing. We must avoid directing our efforts toward keeping people in dying places, and we shouldn’t be misled by sentiment into caring more about a place than the wellbeing of the people who would be better off by leaving it.
This has already happened in other countries, and it's been ugly. In Poland, student enrollment fell from just shy of 2M in 2005 barely to 1.1M now. While large universities in big metro areas went through this somewhat smoothly (they've lowered admissions standards to fill seats but still saw a 10-25% declines in enrollment), smaller unis and especially non-public unis were decimated.
For example in Kielce, a provincial capital of 200k people, student enrollment fell by 70% in the last 20 years. In my hometown of Rybnik, the city repurposed an old hospital into a really nice university campus in the early 2000s; today there are less than 100 students there and many buildings sit empty.
And like I said, these are public universities which are free in Poland. Private colleges, more often located in smaller towns, just simply disappeared.
Poland doesn't necessarily have college towns the way the US does, i.e. a town that's totally dependent on the local college and its students. Instead, it's more about keeping young people around because in Poland, typically if one leaves for college to a big city, they never come back. So when a local college closes, out-migration accelerates because people who would've otherwise attended that college and stay around leave and never come back.
Good analysis. The solution space here seems undertheorized. It seems like no response to a secular industrial decline passes without criticism. People in the Rust Belt were “left behind”, but you also can’t tell them to “learn to code”, even if you really mean it and provide substantial resources for upskilling and retraining. Meanwhile in Europe and Japan we see the dangers of overprotecting industries or the disemployed: decreased dynamism and mass discontent.
I understand why the demographic cliff is so dangerous for colleges. But it seems like this should in theory offer more opportunities for individual students, at least in the near to medium term. There are still plenty of people consuming goods and services, even if they're older on average, so the white collar part of the job sector that helps to create those goods and services would still be needed. Shouldn't the diminishing number of fellow graduates create relative levels of opportunities for graduates?
Yes, AI effects, economic downturns, etc., could impact all this, but that seems like a structurally different issue. For example, if AI takes away, say, 20% of new white collar jobs, then new graduates should still want to compete against fewer other new graduates than they would if we were still in an increasing pool of new graduates. In other words, AI job loss would be bad for young graduates, but it's even more bad for young graduates when there are also many more young graduates.
Great piece. Not a criticism, because that’s not what you set out to do here, but I haven’t seen much written about how young people’s changing choices will affect the trades. Plumbers and electricians command huge wages now (trust me, I’ve had a spate of plumbing issues lately in our 1950s home). Presumably that will change as the supply of them increases, especially in places like rural Kentucky where there’s a finite demand.
Maybe it’s just my algorithm. Probably it’s that the chattering classes are just more interested in writing about college. But I’d love to see an economist or journalist to do some work on kids’ changing choices and the future of the trades … and the cost of home repair!
Yes one thing that we ran out of room for was more discussion on the pendulum swing to the trades! The WSJ piece I cited does a great job at addressing what could happen. In 2023, students studying the construction trades were +23% and HVAC/Vehicle Maintenance were +7% - great in the short-run, but could maybe lead to saturation in the long-term (maybe - as Harry pointed out, there is a severe shortage).
I'd like to see an article on the trades as well, but what I wonder about is: are the supposed wages and other benefits offered by the trades too good to be true?
There's this idea that any tradesman can easily make good money. You'll find people on Reddit saying they make $80k-$100k+ in the trades, for example. But in the (limited) research I've done, this seems like a misleading picture. It seems like the tradespeople who make good money either run an independent business--with all the hassles and long hours that come with it--or are willing to work in non-ideal conditions--night shifts, extensive travel to unsexy locations, and/or dangerous work. I don't know that there are actually that many trades jobs that are equivalent to white collar 9-5s in terms of pay and working conditions.
Plus, I've seen anecdotal claims that trades workplaces are much more likely to be toxic in various ways. And there's the toll the work takes on your body.
I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I worry many young people are being misled about the realities of trades work.
Think about the psychological toll of white collar jobs for a moment, with their toxic office politics and corporate culture. And job insecurity. And their constant reliance on the good graces of others. Think of how exploitative these jobs are, especially at the entrance level.
Also, while considering a white collar career, it's impossible to ignore the debt necessary to incur for the sake of paying for university. These are the remaining factors in the calculus. It's not at all an obvious choice…
Yeah I think if you are will to do something very specialized and quite hazardous (the classic example being underwater welding) you can make very good money, but I'm not sure how sustainable something like that is.
I don't think working for the HVAC company and doing maintenance checks/furnace installations is particularly high paying.
And if you are willing to do hard work in tough conditions, you are better off being like an engineer and working on an oil rig (clearly this is economically cyclical but you get the point).
From my experience it seems like there’s quite a bit of room for supply to grow before it catches up with demand (at least in the home repair trades). I think they’re charging about as much as people will pay and still turning down a lot of jobs (at least they’re turning down my jobs). I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect on prices is pretty mild. Obviously depends on the region tho, areas with lower demand could see more change.
For sure. Things would have to continue along this path for a generation. But that’s not unimaginable.
Good point.
I’m confused about that initial student. The college wage premium remains high, real tuition has declined over the last 15 years, and manufacturing jobs continue to shrink. Stay in school, kid!
Given the number of thinkpieces on how stupid going to college is I keep waiting for these newly flush electricians to start bidding up the prices of houses in my neighborhood but it's not happened yet. I guess we'll see.
Yes, this a really prevalent but wrong meme. I've heard it with my peer groups when it comes to talking about our future children's generation where college "won't be worth it." I always say college is worth it today and probably will be in the future!
I've spent so much time in Bowling Green on work trips over the last decade. I was not expecting a shot of downtown at the top of an Argument article! I've come to appreciate the town quite a bit. Go tops.
Love BG!
Due to remote work, Americans are already moving to college towns.
In Virginia, the Charlottesville region (UVA) grew by 2.5% since the pandemic, with Louisa County, well positioned for an occasional commute to Richmond, Charlottesville, or Fredericksburg, growing by 7.5%. The state as a whole grew by 0.3%.
College towns typically have good infrastructure including widespread broadband Internet, good restaurants, and plenty to do. They often have good hospitals and doctors that help attract retirees.
Just market them to remote workers and retirees. You don’t actually need to increase external immigration if internal migration is already moving in that direction
See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america
“Perhaps the most remarkable statistic in the 2023 population estimates data is that last year the country’s rural counties and smallest metro areas—those with fewer than 250,000 residents—became the top destination for people moving within the country for the first time in decades. Migration into these areas rose exponentially during the pandemic, and still, the net number of people moving to them rose again last year. “
If you talk to well-off retirees non glamorous college towns are often very attractive destinations because they have great amenities but are much more manageable than a major metro. So probably not Boulder or even Davis, but like Flagstaff AZ... Fort Collins CO, Ames IA, Rochester MN isn't a college town but Mayo Clinic gives it a similar vibe.
Excellent idea!
The "Toolbelt Generation".
"Managed Decline".
This essay sent chills down my spine. I've been expecting and dreading the end phase of higher education for a while, since universities began their manic and insane asset acquisition and construction spree… whenever that was. During the late-1990s, I think.
Tuition prices shot up with frightening, surreal speed, even as instructor salaries (and job security) cratered. New students became obliged to borrow *6-digit sums* just to complete their undergrad degrees — a bald-faced extortion which had been absolutely unknown before.
Student exodus seems to be following a pattern set by cable television, which was also once considered an indispensable part of life. I mean — it was certainly useful, convenient, and genuinely valuable as such — but for every benefit, there's a certain price point where cost begins to outweigh it. A price-tipping point, beyond which customers/subscribers/(whatever) simply walk away.
I'm afraid that's what we're beginning to see in higher ed…
Great read. I think there's a lot going on here. One thing I don't think is taken into account is that agglomeration effects are just really prevalent in the Information Age. In the mid-twentieth century there was a lot of value in smaller universities or colleges because they were filling a need similar to the local newspaper. That need was bringing the world to a very specific geographic region.
In the twenty-first century, people can move and access information much easier, so students will opt for bigger state or private schools over the smaller local options. I don't think increasing population will reverse that so long as the bigger schools are responding to that increased demand properly.
On some level, I'm sad to see many small universities close and small towns suffer because of it, but I'm not sure how much of it is reversible in such an interconnected world.
I think there is a slightly misleading statistical claim in the article -
"But here’s the most telling data point from the school’s National Student Clearinghouse data: over 60% of admitted applicants don’t enroll anywhere. Not at a competitor, not at a community college — nowhere." isn't right, according to the figure. It's 60% of the students who chose not to attend WKU.
To figure out what percent of overall applicants that is, we would need to also know the % of admits who do end up attending WKU. It's probably still high, but I'd imagine somewhere under 50%.
Still a really interesting and well done piece!
Thanks for bringing this to our attention! You're right, our original wording misrepresented the statistic we were trying to explain. We have updated the article
Yeah, this sentence needed a fact check, as it's stated claim is in contrast to the chart directly following it.
I kind of do not understand the premise that America failed the Rust Belt. Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh aren't booming but it's not like they're dystopian, they have low unemployment rates and reasonably high wages. Meanwhile Columbus and Indianapolis are growing fast and Cincinnati is home to Kroger and P & G. Sure the industries have changed but the "Rust Belt" is generally doing about as well as you could expect I think. Yes cities like Youngstown are in bad shape, but realistically what's supposed to be the economic future for a city that's based on processing an ore vein that was long exhausted?
Ever visited Detroit — I mean, not downtown where the new baseball stadium lives, but a Detroit neighborhood? On the east side maybe, but just about anywhere that isn't Indian Village, Boston Edison, or the Cultural District?
…
How about Flint, MI?
Sure those places have tons of problems but what's the policy solution when an area is built around an industry that ceases to be globally competitive?
What I never understand in discussions like these is why we care about propping up unproductive places in the first place. It feels like aiming at the wrong target. The most economically and socially productive thing to do would be for people to move out of unproductive places and to productive ones. To the extent that there should be any transitional aid to dying places, it should go to this end instead of impotently trying to arrest the decline of a town caught in the gravitational pull of declining births and dwindling investment. I say this as someone who grew up in the postindustrial Rust Belt. Subsidizing unproductive places makes as much sense and subsidizing unproductive industries. It’s not in our national interest and it’s not worth the immense burden to society as a whole to do so.
Do we believe we need to focus our efforts on helping our people, or do we care more about the land they happen to occupy? If we put our fellow human beings and citizens first, then the best thing for many is to move to a place where opportunity is growing. We must avoid directing our efforts toward keeping people in dying places, and we shouldn’t be misled by sentiment into caring more about a place than the wellbeing of the people who would be better off by leaving it.
This has already happened in other countries, and it's been ugly. In Poland, student enrollment fell from just shy of 2M in 2005 barely to 1.1M now. While large universities in big metro areas went through this somewhat smoothly (they've lowered admissions standards to fill seats but still saw a 10-25% declines in enrollment), smaller unis and especially non-public unis were decimated.
For example in Kielce, a provincial capital of 200k people, student enrollment fell by 70% in the last 20 years. In my hometown of Rybnik, the city repurposed an old hospital into a really nice university campus in the early 2000s; today there are less than 100 students there and many buildings sit empty.
And like I said, these are public universities which are free in Poland. Private colleges, more often located in smaller towns, just simply disappeared.
How did the towns where the universities were located change after the closures?
Poland doesn't necessarily have college towns the way the US does, i.e. a town that's totally dependent on the local college and its students. Instead, it's more about keeping young people around because in Poland, typically if one leaves for college to a big city, they never come back. So when a local college closes, out-migration accelerates because people who would've otherwise attended that college and stay around leave and never come back.
Good analysis. The solution space here seems undertheorized. It seems like no response to a secular industrial decline passes without criticism. People in the Rust Belt were “left behind”, but you also can’t tell them to “learn to code”, even if you really mean it and provide substantial resources for upskilling and retraining. Meanwhile in Europe and Japan we see the dangers of overprotecting industries or the disemployed: decreased dynamism and mass discontent.
I understand why the demographic cliff is so dangerous for colleges. But it seems like this should in theory offer more opportunities for individual students, at least in the near to medium term. There are still plenty of people consuming goods and services, even if they're older on average, so the white collar part of the job sector that helps to create those goods and services would still be needed. Shouldn't the diminishing number of fellow graduates create relative levels of opportunities for graduates?
Yes, AI effects, economic downturns, etc., could impact all this, but that seems like a structurally different issue. For example, if AI takes away, say, 20% of new white collar jobs, then new graduates should still want to compete against fewer other new graduates than they would if we were still in an increasing pool of new graduates. In other words, AI job loss would be bad for young graduates, but it's even more bad for young graduates when there are also many more young graduates.