Submitted by Mark Hanna
Courtesy of MarketMontage. View original post here.
Has price finally reached a point where it impacts demand in our higher education system? Perhaps. 2012 saw lower enrollment than 2011 – a rarity; unfortunately this story doesn’t say the last time this happened but I imagine it has been decades. One could also argue that the job market is improving and a lot of people who were students finally began seeping back into the workforce but this data is certainly interesting as the college tuition bubble expands exponentially.
- The number of U.S. university students declined by almost half a million last year, following years of growth, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The decrease was driven by students 25 and older, with 419,000 fewer enrolled in the fall of 2012 from a year earlier, according to data the Census Bureau released today. The number of college students younger than 25 also declined.
- The cost of college continues to rise as the population of college-age students drops. After two decades of growth, the number of high-school graduates probably peaked at 3.4 million in the 2010-2011 school year, the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education said in January. College enrollment at the undergraduate and graduate levels had grown to 3.2 million between 2006 and 2011 before the decline.
- The study found that in 2012, 19.9 million students were in college, including 5.8 million in two-year programs, 10.3 million in four-year colleges and 3.8 million in graduate school.
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