We are inundated these days with headlines about how our college system is broken and how despondent graduates are due to things like outsized student loan debt.
Are these claims merited?
Undoubtedly.
Should more kids be considering the pros vs. cons on paying $100-200 thousand dollars to attend college?
You bet.
But is that the whole story?
Of course not.
The fact is, like most things in life, there is another side of this story that isn’t getting nearly as much attention.
America currently produces nearly twice as many college graduates as it did just two decades ago (from less than 1.3 million in 2000 to more than 2.1 million in 2022). Yet, over this same period, America’s top colleges, as judged by the U.S. News & World Report rankings, have not increased their enrollment numbers in any measurable way. Look no further than Harvard, which has not increased its freshman class in more than three decades (it was roughly 1,600 in 1990 and is roughly 1,650 for the class of 2023).
So why does this matter?
It matters because it has created a supply/demand imbalance between the number of qualified candidates applying for college and the number of available spots at the top schools.
So, who is impacted by this imbalance?
In short, everyone.
However, a disproportionate amount of the impact falls on the students, the companies trying to hire them, and cities across the country where graduates flock to.
Said another way, this new imbalance has caused a “spillover effect” whereby highly qualified students who used to largely matriculate to universities in the Northeast or California are now attending colleges across the entire country. Look no further than the fact that the average SAT score at The University of Florida is now 1420 for in-state students and 1450
