How Will the Future Shake Out?
By Richard Byrne, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 25, 2005

When people contemplate the future, they rarely do so with any balance. It is utopia or dystopia. So it is with higher education. Over the last few months, The Chronicle has gathered the thoughts of a broad cross section of higher-education experts on where they see academe in the year 2015. Optimists see the more than 4,200 colleges and universities in the United States as flexible enough to shift gears as student populations rise and then fall, and the economy grows and shrinks. Pessimists see decreased student access, higher costs, and falling prestige.

Some things are already known about higher education in 2015. One 2003 projection estimated that the number of high-school graduates will continue to increase slightly — from 3 million in 2005 to nearly 3.2 million in 2009 — and then begin to recede. For most of the forthcoming decade, then, the volume demands on higher education will be greater than ever before.

We also have an idea of what that new wave of students will look like. The number of white high-school graduates is predicted to fall from more than 1.77 million in 2005 to 1.58 million by the end of the decade. The number of black, non-Hispanic high-school graduates will rise slightly during the same period, but it will be far outpaced by growth in the number of Hispanic high-school graduates.

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