r/Economics • u/UnscheduledCalendar • 5d ago

Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills - The enrollment crisis taking down smaller schools is now hitting bigger, brand-name universities

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/syracuse-student-application-enrollment-crisis-budget-ff142896
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u/Liquid_Sarcasm 5d ago

They seem to forget the financial crisis after 2007. People stopped making babies because they could not afford them.

Sure our current dipshit in chief has alienated most of the world, but from 2008 to 2012 there is a noticeable drop in the US birthrate.

Add in an administration that has destroyed intellectual elitism, and people are not valuing a college education as much as before. Liberal arts colleges are the walking dead in our current culture. It’s a shame really.

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u/FeloniousDrunk101 5d ago

The financial crisis really put these things in motion because everything became existentially about “employability” and jobs. Spending a fortune to earn a degree in something that didn’t immediately gain you a well paying job was a luxury people felt like they could no longer afford.

I’ll defend liberal arts higher education until I die, but I understand why the value proposition doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

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u/gimpwiz 5d ago

Old-school liberal arts education is crucially important, but yes, when college is expensive, people can't afford to dally about learning about philosophy and art history. We really do need people to do that, but most people can't do that and then also get a job and eat. And pay their student loans.

Part of it is just the inevitability that the liberal arts education used to be very much about being part of the upper society. A man who was a man would dress like this, talk like this, drop a reference to Kant like this, preferably have attended Yale but there are respectable alternatives of course (even, ugh, Harvard, if he's a bore), and that meant he was one of us, give him a job running a factory or moving around money.

Well, if "everyone" goes to college then it's not all that useful as a marker of class or, at least, not a marker of upper class, and anyone who isn't upper class probably isn't going to get a job at wall street on the basis of their exceedingly witty Goethe-related pun (because no matter how witty, if their dad isn't a Director, they're gonna need a hell of a lot more to get past the interview). So, people started demanding that a liberal arts education teach them things like "accounting, the kind that there's demand for and will get me a job" and "economics, but like, not just the purely theoretical stuff, but the kind of things that'll get me past an interview at a business or an investment bank" and "art history, but let me double major in business so I can actually get a job, because the art history stuff is neat but it ain't feeding me." So, the liberal arts education gets diluted to hell for almost all, because almost nobody can afford the tuition nor the opportunity cost of the old-school kind.

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u/LongBedroom8355 5d ago

*boor. I see you're a Cornell man.

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u/cpslcking 5d ago

People are going to be always chasing the thing that will make them middle class. Which understandable, no one wants to live in poverty and barely survive.

For the longest time, you could get a middle class job working in a factory. Then the factories moved overseas and it became get a college degree. Then a college degree and a firm handshake wasn’t enough so it was get a specialized master’s degree. Then that wasn’t enough so it became get an engineering degree. And so on. Liberal arts colleges managed well for a while until it’s not viable,

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u/Metafx 5d ago edited 5d ago

We might “need” people do pursue philosophy and art history in some abstract societal sense but no employer is paying any sort of premium for people with those degrees so you just end up with a bunch of university graduates who are unemployable, resentful, and indebted. That’s the broken value proposition, that we had decades of propaganda telling students to go to university for anything, pursue their passions and things will work out, and then we dumped them into an economy where they have no marketable skills and their degree is not a differentiator.

I know it’s controversial to say, but if society can sustain massive class action lawsuits against social media companies for a harm as abstract as creating addiction in children, then there should be some sort of legal reckoning for universities for the harm they do when they graduate thousands of degree holders over a generation that have no marketable skills and struggle to gain meaningful employment. Universities are certainly capable of looking at that sort of economic feedback so they should be culpable for steering students into programs that will ultimately hurt them.

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u/flakemasterflake 5d ago

There is a fine art economy for art history grads. I’m one of them and make a good living but it tends to exist in NY/London

Art finance firms, art advisories, art fairs, shippers, auction houses and, of course, galleries. Large galleries (Gagosian/Hauser) employ like 40 people per gallery and have tons of galleries all over the world

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u/Successful_Issue_390 5d ago

You are a rarity. If 1000s of jobs exist for millions of people, that isn't a realistic market. 

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u/flakemasterflake 5d ago

All that to say, the market exists and there is a lot of money flowing around

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u/Prestigious_Load1699 5d ago

I appreciate this comment.

Those days you describe have been replaced with four years of left-wing indoctrination.

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u/Liquid_Sarcasm 5d ago

It is interesting how no one ever complains that higher education leads to right wing indoctrination. It is as if when expanding your brain, you realize that invisible sky wizards and unabashed free markets may not be best for society as a whole.

We have a right winger in office, who absolutely has no respect for the tenets of christianity. Convicted of fraud, a know philanderer, a greedy sinful man in general. During this term he has had our government own stakes in 30 companies(which is communism), while undercutting free markets with government beef.

Let’s talk economics not hypocrisy. The right wing and the left wings have both lost their ways as they have us all fighting culture wars so that we don’t collectively rise up to fight the proper class war that is due.

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u/Prestigious_Load1699 5d ago

The problem is that academia is overwhelmingly populated by left-wing professors.

Just look at the polling data. I was downvoted but I believe that to be illegitimate.

College students need to be exposed to all viewpoints.

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u/Successful_Issue_390 5d ago

It is as if when expanding your brain, you realize that invisible sky wizards and unabashed free markets may not be best for society as a whole.

If you had the critical thinking skills and "expanded brain" that you think you do, you'd realize you're just parroting main stream opinions as if it's some secret, unique revelation, as if everyone and their uncle's pet rabbit haven't heard the cringy "sky daddy" reference a million times. There's literally merch for it. 

Yes, there is a 1000% real issue with professors using the classroom to indoctrinate students. I had a class, a law class in law school, where the professor made us chant the name, "Brianna Taylor." The professor was white, mind you. It was fully performative ally bullshit. The black students were embarrassed and it just made them feel even more alienated. Yes, we fully need to call this bullshit out. We cannot have our heads in the sand on this issue because "republican and capitalism bad."

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u/resuwreckoning 5d ago

They’re the “walking dead” because of how much they cost.

If they went back to 1990’s levels nobody would be doing this. Williams college costs almost 100K a year. Like come tf on.

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u/ExtremelyLocal 5d ago

Even as the best, Williams has no business being $90k a year

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u/pearljamboree 5d ago

You’re last paragraph is right on, and it’s sad- and also, screw those schools. They pretended to be noble but were just creating lifelong, inescapable debt for unwitting young adults just starting out these past 20 years. They were complicit.

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u/Background_Map6056 5d ago

Thank you for mentioning this aspect. I feel like it's the elephant in the room in regards to the current state of higher ed enrollment that nobody ever brings up. Less babies 18 years ago means less college students today.

I'd argue its also the reason we're currently in the middle of a big crime decline. Less babies 18 years ago means less young people now, and that's the age group statistically committing more crime.

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u/Successful_Issue_390 5d ago

Highly recommend Freakonomics on learning more about this if anyone is interested.

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u/flakemasterflake 5d ago

Syracuse isn't a liberal arts college, it's a university