There is a projected enrollment drop off coming pretty soon. If companies make changes to stop blindly evaluating undergrad degrees, you could see a natural business lead change in a generation or so.
We'll see.
I was born in the trough of the baby-bust. Here is a
chart that shows it. Summary:
- Pre-WWII annual births in the US dropped in the 1930's both because of technological changes (industrial workers didn't need and couldn't afford as many kids as agrarian farmers) and because people couldn't afford kids in the Depression. Annual births bottomed out at 2.3M in 1933.
- Annual births skyrocketed during and particularly after the war. In 1946 (first year of the baby boom) there were 3.4M births in the US. Births peaked at over 4M/yr from 1954-1964 (last year of the baby boom).
- Annual births dropped rapidly in the later 1960's and early 1970's for various reasons* and bottomed out at under 3.2M/yr for 1973-1976 (this was when I was born).
- Births then gradually climbed and in 2007 the baby-boom peak of 4.3M from 1957 was surpassed for the first time. However, note that the US Population in 2007 was VASTLY larger than it was in 1957 so even though total births in 2007 (4.316M) were slightly higher than in 1957 (4.3M), the birth rate had dropped from 122.9 per 1,000 15-44 year old females in 1957 to just over half of that at 69.30 per 1,000 15-44 year old females in 2007.
There was a massive increase in college enrollment when the baby-boomers reached college age (1966-1982). In theory this should have dropped when baby-busters like me were reaching college age in the early 1990's. This didn't actually happen. Instead, colleges simply pushed college on an ever larger portion of HS graduates as a work-around for the fact that there were rather obviously less HS graduates when the 3.2M/yr Baby busters were turning 18 in the early 1990's than there were in the 1970's and early 1980's when the 4M+/yr baby boomers were turning 18.
Furthermore, as long as
Griggs remains the law of the land, corporations are effectively prohibited from screening potential employees in any meaningful way themselves so they effectively contract it out to the Universities.
*By "various reasons" I mostly mean the widespread availability of the effective birth control pill. Prior to that it was much more difficult for women to avoid pregnancy without abstaining from sex. The Pill allowed women to put careers first without forgoing intimacy. The pill was invented in 1957 and approved as a contraceptive by the FDA in 1960. It was widely available after Griswold vs Connecticut in 1965.
My dad was born in 1940. Many of his friends either got married immediately after HS at 18-19 or did two or three years in the Military then got married at 20-22 and in either case they generally had kids about 9 months after they got married or in some cases less. That was the norm up until the pill.
If you look at the births/birthrate chart that I posted above, births and particularly the birthrate plummeted right as the pill became available. By the mid-1970's (when I was born) most of the pre-pill mothers who had their first kids in the early 1960's or earlier were done having kids and most of the post-pill mothers who started careers first hadn't started having kids yet so thus, the baby bust. The "echo-boomers" of ~10 years later came along when all those 1970's era career-first women got into their mid to late 30's and suddenly started
hearing a ticking sound.
