That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen…

(The title of this blog post is taken from the title of the blog post I link to immediately below.)

"Why are enrollments falling at community colleges and rising at higher-priced four-year universities?"

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/wasn’t-supposed-happen…

Not at all of them...

My alma mater, a small, relatively prestigious (in its part of the country) liberal arts college has just enrolled its smallest entering class since the early 1950s. Total enrollment is on a course to decline from around 2300 to around 1600-1700 over the next few years. And this comes on the heels of major construction projects, leaving the school with what are potentially redundant facilities and higher operation and maintenance costs. Meanwhile, full-cost tuition will break the $50,000 barrier for the 2019-2020 academic year. That's up from $33,000 in 2009-2010--a 67% increase in tuition during a period in which the CPI rose by 19%.

Since I matriculated there in 1965, tuition has increased 33-fold (from $1500 to $50,000), while the CPI has increased only (roughly) 8-fold.  Room & board was about $900; I spent about $150 on textbooks for the year (the last time I taught intro econ, in the spring of 2018, the price of a new copy of the textbook I used cost $175; my intro econ book, in 1966, was $7…but there’s more to the increasing price of textbooks than simply inflation).  I had about $40 per month for personal spending.  So, in 1965-66, one year of college was about $2900; let’s round that up to $3000.  If college costs had increased at the same rate as prices in general (a factor of 8), one year of college at a reasonably selective small liberal arts college would cost about $24,000. 

In the upcoming academic year, the total cost (with no financial aid) will be about $65,000.  That is roughly the median family income in the US.  For a family to pay the full cost of attending my alma mater and spend half of its pre-tax income—they’d need an income of $130,000—which is at the 80^th percentile of the income distribution—only 20% of the households in the US have incomes higher than that. 

So what about attending Indiana University, as an in-state student, paying the full cost today?  Roughly $25,000, up from roughly $1500 (or half the cost of my school in 1965 and 40% of the cost today)—a relative bargain, I suppose, although that cost is up by a factor of 16—twice the rate of inflation.
(All the above data is readily available through judicious use of a search engine.)

I am fully aware that institutions of higher education are subject to what is known as “Baumol’s Disease.”*  That does not mean that we should just accept that the price of attending college in the US must rise at the same rate as the costs of providing a college education—and, indeed, we have not.  But we have relied too much on debt to finance the current pricing structure, in effect shifting the cost from the present to the future.  What we need is to expand support for higher education—through taxes for public schools and, implicitly, also for private schools (through the use of tax-financed grants).  Private schools will (and should, really) remain more expensive.  But if a selective private liberal arts college cost families/students only $24,000 per year and public universities cost them only $12,000, then advanced educations would be much, much more affordable, and the promise that we thought, in the 1950s and 1960s, we were making to our citizens about education would again become a reality rather than, increasingly, a pipe dream.

*Named for William Baumol, who presented the first rigorous analysis of the problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Beginning very early on in the history of the United States, immigrants have been regarded as somehow "other," and inferior, possibly not fully human. Look at the response to the Irish immigration (late 1840s/early 1850s), which was a consequence of the potato famine. (The "know-nothing" party was maybe the clearest manifestation of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing)

Later, as immigration from eastern (Poland; Russia--many of these immigrants were also Jewish) Europe, southern Europe (Italy. Greece), and Asia (especially, but not only, China), anti-immigrant sentiments shifted. Chinese immigration was *legally prohibited* beginning in 1882 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act).
(Read the whole thing...)

And a discussions of the response to European immigration. (https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/513)

Eastern and southern immigration:
"Between 1880 and 1910, almost fifteen million immigrants entered the United States, a number which dwarfed immigration figures for previous periods. Unlike earlier nineteenth century immigration, which consisted primarily of immigrants from Northern Europe, the bulk of the new arrivals hailed mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. These included more than two and half million Italians and approximately two million Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as many Poles, Hungarians, Austrians, Greeks, and others.
"The new immigrants’ ethnic, cultural, and religious differences from both earlier immigrants and the native-born population led to widespread assertions that they were unfit for either labor or American citizenship. A growing chorus of voices sought legislative restrictions on immigration. Often the most vocal proponents of such restrictions were labor groups (many of whose members were descended from previous generations of Irish and German immigrants), who feared competition from so-called “pauper labor.” "
Note the opposition of earlier German immigrants to the immigration of Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians (and especially Jews).

IQ tests were used (and, I think, developed) as a tool to restrict immigration in the early 1900s:
"Low test scores (given as an intelligence quotient, or IQ) were used by eugenicists to lobby in the US Congress for restricting immigration of those claimed to be genetically inferior in IQ."
https://www.researchgate.net/…/230435620_Intelligence_Tests…
And, as this articles in the Smithsonian puts it:
"This Jigsaw Puzzle Was Given to Ellis Island Immigrants to Test
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/…/puzzle-given-ellis-island…/

Famously, Jews attempting to flee the Nazis were denied entry to the US in the 1930s; the Dominican Republic, unlike the US did admit them:
"In the end, only one country, the Dominican Republic, officially agreed to accept refugees from Europe. (Dictator Rafael Trujillo, influenced by the international eugenics movement, believed that Jews would improve the “racial qualities” of the Dominican population.)"
https://www.facinghistory.org/defying…/america-and-holocaust

While the response to the "boat people" from Viet Nam was somewhat more restrained (in terms of official immigration policy--perhaps in part because so many were children of US military personnel), they were not warmly welcomed in a lot of US communities, especially along the Gulf coast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_boat_people
and
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2545339…
(In my opinion, the response to the plight of Vietnamese refugees was particularly unfortunate, because the US was largely responsible for the conditions that led them to flee their homes.)

So what we are facing today is not anything new. In all--or almost all (we have not really escaped our reluctance to allow immigrants from Latin America)--the previous cases, attitudes changed; groups that were excluded or stigmatized (especially the Chinese) became desirable.

It's almost as if we don't want to remember our past, and, we refuse to remember it, and we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Or, as George Santayana put it more eloquently:

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim... Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Labor Force Participation of Teenagers Over Time

Or more specifically, labor force participation rates of people ages 16-19.

Teens have the most volatile within-year labor force participation, with a substantially higher percentage of teens in the labor force in June, July, and August than the rest of the year.  This is not, of course, surprising, because most--or at least many--teens are in school either full-time and part-time.  And, over time, the general level of teen labor force participation has changed quite significantly, as the following chart shows.

What's most interesting to me right now are the "cohort" effects.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics data begin in 1948, so that initial group consists of those born between 1929 (19 in 1948) and those born in 1932 (16 in 1948).  The chart shows what has happened to succeeding cohorts.  From 1948 to 1960, the labor force participation of 16-19 year-olds, both during the school year (the blue dots) and during the summer (red), dclined a lot--down from around 50% during toe school year to around 40%, and from around 6o% during the summers to around 55%..  (By 1961, that's the group born between 1941 and 1944; it is one of the smaller birth cohorts in US history--for obvious reasons.)

Then the participation begins to rise.  And it seems to have risen both for the early "baby boom" kids and for those born slightly earlier.  By 1980 (those born between 1961 and 1964), labor force participation had risen to about 55% during the school year and around 70% during the summer.  And, it is worth noting, college attendance rates were rising as well.  Whether the rise in summertime labor force participation can be attributed to college students seeking work to help pay for college is a valid hypothesis, but I clearly have not proved that's what drove this.

Since 1980, teen labor force participation has consistently declined, and is now at lower levels than at any time for which we have reliable data--around 35% during the school year (up from even lower levels--around 32% between 2010 and 2015--during the school year) and between 40% and 45% during the summer.  And, the ga between school year and summer participation has narrowed--from around 15% t0 20% in the 1940s and 1950s, to around 10%.  The continuing decline in teen labor force participation has tended to reduce the overall unemployment rate (teen unemployment rates are higher than adult rates) slightly.  

What interests me most about all this is the decline in summer labor force participation.  (I will add here that, although I have not disaggregated by gender, labor force participation for teen women fell less in the 1950s, rose more in the 1960s and 1970s, and has declined less since 1980 that it did for males.)  What was a significant source of funds to support college attendance in the "baby boom" era has quite clearly eroded.  I suspect that part of this might be a consequence of year-round college attendance (although that should, it seems, be at least partially offset by the growth in part-time attendance).  But part of it is probably a result of changes in employment patterns in the overall economy.

In manufacturing, not only are there fewer jobs, those jobs are probably less seasonal, which means fewer opportunities for teens attending college.  The same seems likely to be true in retail, although seasonality in retail employment is likely to have increased, in anything.  And many local governments face significant funding constraints for summer programs, so seasonal employment is likely to have declined there as well.

I would also emphasize a point made above...summer employment is no longer as significant a source of income to support college attendance as it was 20 or 30 4 40 years ago.  Generally, resorting to anecdote is not necessarily a convincing rhetorical strategy, but I will anyway.  I worked every summer beginning a age 16 (1964), through the summer after my college graduation (1969, which was before I entered graduate achool)--six years of summer employment.  That contributed between 10% and 20% of the annual cost of my college attendance.  And almost everyone I knew had the same sort of summer employment.  I would guess that declining summer employment opportunities has caused some increased reliance on student borrowing; I also would giess that we would be better off as a society if we could somehow return to a world of more robust summer earning opportunities for teenagers.