February 26, 2025 • 29 mins
The number of high school graduates in the U.S. is expected to decline for several years. In this episode, Peter Ghazarian joins us to discuss the experiences of higher ed institutions in Korea and Japan, which have recently experienced similar reductions in college enrollments. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. He is the author of a very recent article on higher education and an aging population in the U.S.
A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.
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(00:00):
The number of high school graduates in the U.S. is expected to decline for several years. In
this episode, we discuss the experiences of higher ed institutions in Korea and Japan,
which have recently experienced similar reductions in college enrollments.
(00:23):
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective
practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted
by John Kane, an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer...
...and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make
higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:54):
Our guest today is Peter Ghazarian. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership
in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK,
Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy,
multiculturalism, and human migration. He is the author of a very recent article on higher
(01:16):
education and an aging population in the U.S. Welcome back, Peter.
I'm very glad to be here. Thank you.
Today's teas are… Peter? Are you drinking tea?
I am drinking tea. I've got a spearmint tea here
That sounds nice and refreshing. I have a Lady Grey today, John
And I have a ginger peach green tea today.
I love a good ginger tea. I'm always in favor of that.
(01:39):
We invited you here today, Peter, to discuss your article, “Higher education and an aging population
in the USA (01:44):
learning from the experiences of Korea and Japan,” which was first published
on January 5 of this year. Fertility rates have been declining in all the industrialized nations,
and the number of high school graduates is expected to reach a peak in 2025 followed
by a gradual decline. Have some US regions already been experiencing
this decline in college-age populations in response to internal migration patterns?
(02:08):
Yes. So we hear all the time about this demographic cliff that's coming,
that's going to have a profound impact on higher education in the United States. And
for quite a bit of time, I just felt like it may just be scare mongering, because I hadn't really
looked at the data directly myself, and it almost seemed as though it might just be an excuse for
structural change in higher education, a way to justify changes people already wanted. But then
(02:31):
I decided to dig a little bit deeper, and I saw that there is some pretty profound change coming,
especially in particular regions of the US. So in the northeast and in the midwest in particular,
we're seeing a lot of internal migration to the south and to the west, and a lot of urbanization
that is kind of hollowing out rural areas that play host to a lot of these smaller,
(02:53):
tuition-dependent higher education institutions that really put them in a vulnerable position.
So, in this study, you're comparing the US experience with that of Korea and
Japan. Could you talk about why you selected Korea and Japan as a basis for comparison?
Sure, absolutely. So there were really two major reasons why I decided to go with Korea and Japan.
(03:14):
One is that they've already experienced this phenomenon. It's been going on there already,
and so it's an opportunity to kind of peek into the future of what it might look like
further down along the line, and the types of things we might want to prepare for before this
is upon us. And then the other reason is just because I spent so much time there, a good 7,
8, 9 years in Korea working in higher education, and I realized that a lot of the things I was
(03:39):
hearing here kind of echoed what I was hearing at faculty meetings and in press releases at my
former institutions, since it kind of tickled something inside me like, wait a minute,
I've heard this before, and it inspired me to go and look back at exactly what had been going on.
You kind of mentioned that Korea and Japan have been dealing with these issues for a
bit of time. What was their experience like? Were those institutions closing? merging?
(04:03):
Well, I mean, they're still dealing with it now. They haven't really solved the issue of a very
low birth rate, and the impact that it's had on higher education has primarily been a push towards
mergers, and that, I think, has been facilitated by a number of environmental characteristics in
those places that is helpful and conducive to the merger of higher education institutions,
(04:29):
just because they're much more dense in terms of the population distribution. There isn't nearly
as much land as there is here, and very large populations, and so even with population decline
or population aging in certain areas, there's still a relatively large number of people within
a certain range around particular institutions. And so mergers become much more feasible,
(04:52):
because if there isn't enough to support two institutions, if we bring them together and make
one, we should be able to get by. And so, yeah, I would say mergers by far have been the most
common response in both Korea and Japan. Though Korea has had its fair share of closures as well.
In your paper, you talk a little bit about the types of mergers that were
occurring in Korea and Japan. Can you talk a little bit about that?
(05:14):
Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that there were some characteristics that help to allow these
mergers to go forward, and one of them is some of the patterns that we see in ownership of the
higher education institutions in Korea and Japan, because there was such a boom in higher education
not so long ago, like in the past 50 years, a lot of these institutions are actually owned by
(05:36):
similar groups or similar individuals or families, and so they would successfully
establish a four-year institution and then want to open a polytechnic or a trade school of some kind,
or what we would call a community college, but there would be called a junior college,
and that made it very easy. If the same group of people own both institutions and
(05:56):
they realize both are struggling, well, we'll cut out some of the overhead costs
by merging these together. And there was also some policies in place from the government that
sort of pushed these institutions to do this as well, because the governments in both Korea and
Japan wanted to preserve a certain amount of stability in their higher education systems to
prevent what people might perceive as collapse, and so there was a kind of gradual, gentle
(06:20):
pressure to merge institutions over time that seemed to be helpful towards getting this done.
So what are some of the factors that affected the likelihood
of institutions in Korea or Japan to survive these demographic shifts?
I would say that the major sort of elements that played into whether or not an institution
could survive were (06:39):
their location, rural institutions were particularly vulnerable;
their size, smaller institutions struggled more; and then their focus, comprehensive
four-year institutions tended to fare better unless they were both rural and very small,
those institutions were very vulnerable. It was like a combination of those things. If
(06:59):
you were rural and remote, you're in trouble. If you're rural and very small, you're in trouble.
The other was the focus, four-year institutions tended to be all right. They tended to do okay,
because what we started to see in Korea and Japan is that as there were fewer and fewer
people applying for admission, it was easier to get a position at a four-year institution,
(07:20):
and that a lot of these two-year institutions were almost overflow in the past, where they would take
on students who had wanted to go to a four-year institution but weren't able to get admission,
and so they settled for a two-year option before moving into the workforce. But now,
because there weren't as many students applying, institutions were more willing to take on these
students who otherwise may have gone to a two-year institution, which left two-year institutions
(07:45):
really struggling to get a sufficient number of students to be able to support themselves.
And as you noted with internal migration decisions in the US, with people moving to the south and
west and moving away from rural areas, we're already seeing some colleges being hit. What are
some of the ways in which US colleges have dealt with this, or perhaps failed to deal with this?
(08:06):
I would say that the institutions tend to take three different sort of outlooks
to this issue or this problem of demographic cliff that they see coming. Some institutions
are trying to really cut back to reduce costs, and they use it to justify changes
they make at their institutions, which can be unsettling to faculty. I've seen, for example,
programs merge or programs close where even tenured faculty have lost their positions as
(08:31):
a result of this sort of hard-nosed approach that's being adopted by some administrations,
and then it's justified through the need for cost cutting in anticipation of these changes
that are going to be coming to the institution. Another approach is a sort of like plug your ears
and whistle. Some institutions have just really been kind of hoping for the best in the long run,
and this might have an impact on others, but it's not going to have an impact on us,
(08:53):
and they're just kind of going forward with business as usual. And if the reputation of
the institution is strong enough, then they are likely to come out all right in the end, because
while there might be some displacement in terms of who had gone there before and who goes there now,
in the end, their situation isn't going to change that much from what they've experienced in the
past. And so it's understandable why they would kind of take this sort of rose colored glasses
(09:16):
approach to the situation. And then finally, we're starting to see some institutions who
realize that they're going to need to change, but they're not exactly sure how. And so they're
kind of preparing themselves to be able to change. They're communicating out to faculty,
to staff, and to administrators, that there are challenges coming at us, and we're going to
need to be able to make some changes to how we do things. And so they're starting to instigate, for
(09:39):
example, new thinking about how programs should change and how the structure of the institution
might need to change, and really encouraging, internally, people to prepare themselves for
doing something different so that they can survive in a new environment. And so I would say that's
sort of the third approach, the getting ready approach. The first is really all about cutting,
(10:00):
the second is, “Just forget about it. It'll be okay,” and the third kind of priming the pump,
if you will, for future change that is going to need to happen in higher education institutions.
You noted there are some landscape differences between the US and Korea
and Japan in terms of population density and literally the amount
of land in different spaces. But can you talk about what we can learn from
(10:21):
the experiences in Korea and Japan and ways that we might move forward here?
So I came into this thinking that there would be clear takeaways, but instead it left me feeling
a little nervous about the situation in the United States, because in Korea and Japan,
you had a highly interested government that was pretty deeply involved in maintaining
(10:43):
the stability of higher education, whereas in the United States, the government is much more
remotely involved. They're not really directly getting into the nitty gritty of the provision
of higher education within the country, they're only really indirectly a part of what's going
on. And the good will that we see between higher education in Korea and Japan and the government
(11:04):
doesn't really exist here to that same extent. And so we don't have someone looking after us…
…like a safety net….
…yeah, a safety net. And so the government in Korea and Japan, they created policies
to make mergers more smooth, and they would use Ministry of Education reviews of higher education
institutions to make adjustments to quotas for students at institutions to reduce the impact
(11:29):
of demographic decline across the board, so that was more shared, but also so that institutions
that scored lower on ministry reviews of their institution, or institutions they believed to
have a lower quality were kind of cut off over time from this pool of students, so that there
was a gradual change as time went on. But we don't really have that here. It's much more…
(11:50):
it's a free market, and people go where they want to go, and that can be really destructive, and it
can bring a lot of change from one year to the next year, where institutions expect something,
and then all of a sudden they just don't have enough students to keep going on. And so the
other sort of element of it is that there's a positive public opinion of higher education in
Korea and Japan, the sense that it's a public good that we need, that we can't live without,
(12:14):
and I feel like people are questioning that here in the United States, and so we don't have that
same level of public goodwill to rely on as well. The one exception to that that I have
is that there's a strong connection between alumni and the institutions that come from
here in the United States. So we do see some cases where alumni are sort of riding into the rescue,
like Sweet Briar College, where alumni came together and donated to keep the institution open,
(12:39):
to prevent it from closing. And so we do see some of that grassroots support coming from
people who have a personal connection to the institutions. But I would say that that's going
to be the exception, rather than the rule. It's just, I mean, alumni, you can only ask so much.
Yeah, that's great news. When I was reading your article, I was like, “Oh, yeah, okay…”
One way of addressing this, and many institutions have been, is that we've had a lot of underserved
(13:04):
populations in the US, people from low income communities, people who are first-generation
college students and students from historically underrepresented groups have much lower college
attendance rates, and this is a period of time when the rate of return to higher education
is the highest we've ever seen in the US. But there may also be some political issues there,
(13:26):
because in order to bring in some groups from lower income households, it does require larger
amounts of subsidies, and we're not seeing that same sort of increase. In this political climate,
do you see that as being very likely as perhaps a way of expanding the reach of
higher education and perhaps improving our rates of intergenerational income mobility?
(13:49):
Yeah, I would say one of the unique sort of opportunities available to us here in the
United States is the fact that we have these large pools of people who maybe traditionally
haven't taken part in higher education, and as a result of which we can kind of cater to
bringing in new people into higher ed, bringing in first-generation students, and it's good for
institutions because they can better respond to the fact that they don't have as many applicants
(14:14):
as they had in the past, or they don't have as many students as they had in the past,
and it allows them to support themselves. And it's good for the students, because, as you mentioned,
it opens doors economically to new sort of opportunities available within the US economy
and different lifestyles within different social classes. And so I would say that,
yeah, absolutely, that there is this unique opportunity here in the United States,
(14:38):
but there are certainly challenges. The programs that are designed to help us with retention
and to making adjustments to the way that we do things in higher education to be more responsive
to the needs of students who are coming from a first-generation background are the very programs
that are under threat now with the change that we've seen politically within the United States.
(14:59):
And so this lifeline that we had is at real risk now because all of the effort
that we've put into making higher education a more open and welcoming place to people coming
from backgrounds that traditionally didn't take part in higher education may feel less
welcome as a result of a lot of these programs being shut down. In fact, I'm working on a study
(15:20):
now on the impact of DEI programs having been made illegal in the state of Texas,
and how that's impacted the student experience there. And so I'm very interested to see what
sort of results we get from that study. But I have a feeling that it's not going to be all good news.
One of the other areas for potential enrollment growth that's been discussed
quite a bit in the US is the admission of more international students. There's a lot
(15:44):
of desire for international students to get US education, but you note that the political
climate has become less welcoming. What's the future of this looking like right now?
And this wasn't true, not just in the US, but also Korea and Japan sought to attract more
international students. They saw it as a potential way to respond to declining numbers of domestic
(16:04):
students and provide support to institutions, and some institutions were quite successful in being
able to draw international students. I wouldn't say that higher education across the board really
succeeded in Korea and Japan, but there were some key institutions that really excelled at this,
and it became a niche for them that allowed them to sort of weather the storm. Here in
the United States, I would say that we've always been a top choice destination for
(16:26):
international students around the world. And so it's pretty clear that we could rely on this,
or it was pretty clear we could rely on this in the past, but what we've seen is that there was
kind of an unfortunate mix of developments that occurred within the country that have made us less
attractive as a destination. The first of which that comes to mind would be just COVID-19 really
(16:49):
tarnished the image of the United States, just in the response and in a sense of sort of chaos
that students felt while they were here in the United States. That they communicated back home,
a sense of lawlessness, almost in the country, that this is a place where people don't follow
the rules and where there isn't sort of a clear, organized response to issues or
(17:11):
problems as they emerge, and that was very bad for U.S. higher education, just because
that type of damage to a country's image is very difficult to come back from. It lingers.
It's almost generational change when people shift in their view of a particular country,
and so that plays into decisions around where to go to study. And then the other you sort of
(17:34):
alluded to is political change, and I don't think it's as simple as just a shift in administration,
but we've witnessed in the public discourse a real change in how people talk and think about
people who are coming to the United States from other countries, and people feel that,
they feel that they hear it in the discourse. And you know when you're not welcome,
you know you're visiting someone's house, and you hear them talking about you in the kitchen, and
(17:56):
they're not saying nice things, unless you really, really want to be there, you're just less likely
to stick around. And I think that that has really contributed as well to this decline we're seeing
in the numbers of international students who have come to the United States. And so again, there's
always going to be institutions that because due to their reputation or due to their location,
are still going to draw on a large number of students. But it's not going to be a safety net
(18:19):
for institutions who are most vulnerable to this decline, places that are located in rural areas or
who are specialized in a particular academic area, or institutions that are very small, these are
the places that are the least likely to attract international students, and so it's just not a
good solution, or it's not the solution that many had hoped that it would be, at least at this time.
(18:41):
One other thing you talk about in your paper a little bit is shifting the focus
of the course offerings and the focus of the programs offered by institutions.
Can you talk a little bit about how that's been done in Korea and Japan,
and whether institutions here are already starting to do this a bit, and perhaps, might that be a way
of maintaining the relevance and the strength of a larger proportion of higher ed institutions?
(19:05):
I think institutions are still trying to figure out how they can change the curriculum to make
them fit into the society that we live in. And we see pressure on institutions coming
from the labor market and then from this new discourse around accountability for
institutions in terms of student outcomes in the labor market. And it makes me a little nervous,
to be honest. I'm not sure that it's necessarily a good thing, and in Korea, at least, I don't know
(19:29):
about this as much in Japan, but in Korea, we saw things like funding for our departments being tied
to the percentage of students who were full-time employed with benefits a certain amount of time
after graduation, and that funding levels for departments would shift to the point that even
positions could go away. If you cannot provide successful employment outcomes for students,
(19:55):
then the justification for that program or for those positions might go away. And so
that created a lot of discomfort among faculty and among administrators who really felt the
squeeze in terms of everything we do has to be targeted in some way to a particular job,
and we need to be preparing students in some way for work. Everything we do has
(20:16):
to be focused on getting students ready for work. And I think that that's disruptive and
not helpful for higher education. I think that those things are absolutely very important,
but that they fly in the face of the mission of a lot of higher education institutions,
and that there's a real danger of losing touch with the original purpose of these institutions.
(20:37):
And so I would say that I think I much more appreciate the efforts to just prepare people for
change without necessarily knowing which direction we're going to be headed, because otherwise, some
of this is quite disruptive and it's destructive as well. It makes me a little bit nervous.
Given your experience, what role do you see faculty
(20:58):
playing in shaping the future change that needs to come?
Well, in some places, we are seeing faculty taking a more proactive role in creating new
programs and to creating even new schools. So I don't know if you've heard much about, I believe
it's Arizona State University, they have, like a School of Ocean Futures and some pretty new sort
(21:20):
of ways of organizing what the programs that are available at the institution with a clear
focus on the future. So that they're hopeful that students that come out of these programs
are able to find a place in the future world, at least as they envision it. And so I think faculty
members who sort of take the lead in this work and help to sort of reorganize higher education
(21:40):
around what might be needed in the future, they have a role to play there if they're able to do
that. But in a lot of cases, faculty members are very resistant to any sort of change, and so,
in fact, they've kind of become antagonists to any of this work. And I understand that. Higher
education looked a certain way for a very long time, and that's what people sort of
(22:00):
envision it’s going to continue to look like in the future, and they are cynical about any sort
of changes that others are trying to impose on higher education, and maybe rightly so.
And one of the ways, I think that we've seen that in the wider universe of colleges and
universities is gutting some of the traditional liberal arts departments and majors. We've seen
some schools give up music departments or give up art departments, or art history,
(22:25):
or sometimes seriously cutting back on history or math and other areas. I gather that that's
something you probably would not advocate for as part of this transition to the future.
Liberal arts institutions are the greatest threat is the reality of it. So the institutions that
we've seen closing in the Northeast in particular have been small liberal arts institutions,
(22:46):
and so I am very much in favor of the mission of these liberal arts institutions, personally.
But if people aren't going because that's not what they're looking for in higher education,
then the problem we have isn't with the programs we're offering. There's a program with what people
perceive as being valuable in the society and how social values have changed over time, that
(23:06):
people aren't interested in learning about music and they're not interested in learning art, and
that's, to me, is terrifying, but it's the reality of what we're seeing in terms of demand is that
people want this very clear economic benefit as a result of attending higher education, and if they
don't see a clear one-to-one correlation, that they tend to be more dismissive of it as something
that's not necessary or something that they don't need, which creates a lot of this pressure,
(23:30):
and it's used to justify things like gutting out some of these programs like you mentioned. I think
higher education has grown dangerously sort of disconnected from public life, and that people
see higher education institutions as something that's very removed and something that's stuck in
the past and something that isn't really tied to sort of public opinion and the public discourse,
(23:52):
and that puts us in such a dangerous position, and so that really, really makes me worry about the
future for higher education, because there isn't a clear vision about where do we fit in the society
of the future, what role do we play? And we're becoming increasingly vestigial, almost, in the
way that people talk about and think about higher education, in a way that leaves me very worried.
(24:12):
That seems like the critical difference too, that you identified in your study, really between the
differences between Korea and Japan too, right? Is that really how it played out?
And even at a personal level, I could feel the difference working in higher education as a
faculty member in South Korea. In society, I was awarded a certain amount of respect from anybody
(24:32):
who learned that I was a professor or a faculty member, and people would seek out my opinion or
seek out my participation in programs in a way that I just don't see here in the United States.
In a way, when people learn I'm a professor in the United States, their response is very
different from in Korea, and that was sort of a warning bell for me in terms of, this is how they
see higher education here. It's very different from what I had experienced in other settings.
(24:57):
And on that cheery note… you had mentioned the shift out of the Midwest and the Northeast into
other regions of the country. So what types of differences do you see between the experience
of the Midwest and the New England region in terms of the response to these shifts?
So I would say that the sort of the major difference that we see between the Northeast
(25:19):
and the Midwest is that in the northeast, there were more successful mergers, and that has to do
with the fact that there is less distance between institutions in the northeast, it is a little
bit more densely populated, and so oftentimes the institutions that were having trouble were
able to reach out to neighboring institutions, especially smaller institutions, would reach out
to larger neighboring institutions, and they were able to come to some sort of agreement where they
(25:42):
would merge. There's one exception to this in the Northeast, where two similarly sized institutions,
neither of which were struggling, this was Berklee College of Music and then the Boston Conservatory,
they just spoke with each other and decided we should share these overhead costs that we're
dealing with, and we'll become one music institution within Boston, and otherwise,
it tended to be smaller institutions that were struggling reaching out to larger neighbors
(26:05):
and getting some help and becoming a part of that larger neighbor. And oftentimes they would fill in
sort of an area of relative weakness within that larger institution. Something that comes to mind,
for example, is Wheelock College joining Boston University and becoming sort of the specialized
college in education and human services within Boston University. And so there were some pretty
(26:25):
happy stories there about mergers working out. It was more remote, small liberal arts
institutions in the Northeast that were the most likely to close, and that contrasted a little
with the eastern Midwest, where a lot of the times we saw religious affiliated institutions were the
ones that were struggling. There were quite a few Christian colleges that weren't able to find a way
(26:46):
forward. And in terms of the mergers that we saw, they tended to be highly specialized institutions
that were sort of gobbled up by neighbors that didn't have a program or any offerings in that
area, and saw it as an opportunity to expand out what they offered at their institutions.
So the stories were pretty similar, but there were some differences in terms of the success
(27:07):
rate of mergers and the types of institutions that were struggling in those different regions.
Well, with all that good news today, we always end by asking, what's next?
This was a very, sort of a zoomed out look at what's going on here in the United States. And
I think that there's some real value in taking a closer look at the stories of these institutions,
(27:27):
those that do end up closing and then those that are able to make it through. And so I'm
hoping to do a series of comparative case studies looking at institutions
around the Northeast. There's even one that's quite close to us here in Aurora,
New York. I think it's Well’s and so I'm hoping to take a closer look at some of
these institutions and their stories but haven't decided the exact sort of focus I want to take.
(27:49):
But part of me wants to look at the impact on the local economies of places that do close.
What's the sort of impact that we're seeing on the people that live around the places where
these institutions used to be located, and the places that do succeed, what role did their
relationships to their local community play in their ability to kind of make it through and so
I’m still in the brainstorming phase there, but this is something I've been thinking about doing.
(28:12):
Well, thank you. This has been such a cheery conversation, but it's one that all institutions
have to address, because we are going to be coming up to some really challenging times,
and if higher ed institutions are to survive, they're going to have to be a little bit creative
and maybe more flexible in terms of addressing the changing environment in which we're living.
But studies such as this, though, can perhaps give us more information about what paths
(28:36):
have been successful. So thank you, and we're looking forward to hearing your future studies.
Thank you, and thanks for having me on.
Yeah, thanks for the zoomed out look. I think that's helpful for everyone to get a good grasp
on what the landscape really looks like and how it does compare to some other places.
(28:56):
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materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
The number of high school graduates in the U.S. is expected to decline for several years. In
this episode, we discuss the experiences of higher ed institutions in Korea and Japan,
which have recently experienced similar reductions in college enrollments.
(00:23):
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective
practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted
by John Kane, an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer...
...and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make
higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:54):
Our guest today is Peter Ghazarian. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership
in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK,
Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy,
multiculturalism, and human migration. He is the author of a very recent article on higher
(01:16):
education and an aging population in the U.S. Welcome back, Peter.
I'm very glad to be here. Thank you.
Today's teas are… Peter? Are you drinking tea?
I am drinking tea. I've got a spearmint tea here
That sounds nice and refreshing. I have a Lady Grey today, John
And I have a ginger peach green tea today.
I love a good ginger tea. I'm always in favor of that.
(01:39):
We invited you here today, Peter, to discuss your article, “Higher education and an aging population
in the USA (01:44):
learning from the experiences of Korea and Japan,” which was first published
on January 5 of this year. Fertility rates have been declining in all the industrialized nations,
and the number of high school graduates is expected to reach a peak in 2025 followed
by a gradual decline. Have some US regions already been experiencing
this decline in college-age populations in response to internal migration patterns?
(02:08):
Yes. So we hear all the time about this demographic cliff that's coming,
that's going to have a profound impact on higher education in the United States. And
for quite a bit of time, I just felt like it may just be scare mongering, because I hadn't really
looked at the data directly myself, and it almost seemed as though it might just be an excuse for
structural change in higher education, a way to justify changes people already wanted. But then
(02:31):
I decided to dig a little bit deeper, and I saw that there is some pretty profound change coming,
especially in particular regions of the US. So in the northeast and in the midwest in particular,
we're seeing a lot of internal migration to the south and to the west, and a lot of urbanization
that is kind of hollowing out rural areas that play host to a lot of these smaller,
(02:53):
tuition-dependent higher education institutions that really put them in a vulnerable position.
So, in this study, you're comparing the US experience with that of Korea and
Japan. Could you talk about why you selected Korea and Japan as a basis for comparison?
Sure, absolutely. So there were really two major reasons why I decided to go with Korea and Japan.
(03:14):
One is that they've already experienced this phenomenon. It's been going on there already,
and so it's an opportunity to kind of peek into the future of what it might look like
further down along the line, and the types of things we might want to prepare for before this
is upon us. And then the other reason is just because I spent so much time there, a good 7,
8, 9 years in Korea working in higher education, and I realized that a lot of the things I was
(03:39):
hearing here kind of echoed what I was hearing at faculty meetings and in press releases at my
former institutions, since it kind of tickled something inside me like, wait a minute,
I've heard this before, and it inspired me to go and look back at exactly what had been going on.
You kind of mentioned that Korea and Japan have been dealing with these issues for a
bit of time. What was their experience like? Were those institutions closing? merging?
(04:03):
Well, I mean, they're still dealing with it now. They haven't really solved the issue of a very
low birth rate, and the impact that it's had on higher education has primarily been a push towards
mergers, and that, I think, has been facilitated by a number of environmental characteristics in
those places that is helpful and conducive to the merger of higher education institutions,
(04:29):
just because they're much more dense in terms of the population distribution. There isn't nearly
as much land as there is here, and very large populations, and so even with population decline
or population aging in certain areas, there's still a relatively large number of people within
a certain range around particular institutions. And so mergers become much more feasible,
(04:52):
because if there isn't enough to support two institutions, if we bring them together and make
one, we should be able to get by. And so, yeah, I would say mergers by far have been the most
common response in both Korea and Japan. Though Korea has had its fair share of closures as well.
In your paper, you talk a little bit about the types of mergers that were
occurring in Korea and Japan. Can you talk a little bit about that?
(05:14):
Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that there were some characteristics that help to allow these
mergers to go forward, and one of them is some of the patterns that we see in ownership of the
higher education institutions in Korea and Japan, because there was such a boom in higher education
not so long ago, like in the past 50 years, a lot of these institutions are actually owned by
(05:36):
similar groups or similar individuals or families, and so they would successfully
establish a four-year institution and then want to open a polytechnic or a trade school of some kind,
or what we would call a community college, but there would be called a junior college,
and that made it very easy. If the same group of people own both institutions and
(05:56):
they realize both are struggling, well, we'll cut out some of the overhead costs
by merging these together. And there was also some policies in place from the government that
sort of pushed these institutions to do this as well, because the governments in both Korea and
Japan wanted to preserve a certain amount of stability in their higher education systems to
prevent what people might perceive as collapse, and so there was a kind of gradual, gentle
(06:20):
pressure to merge institutions over time that seemed to be helpful towards getting this done.
So what are some of the factors that affected the likelihood
of institutions in Korea or Japan to survive these demographic shifts?
I would say that the major sort of elements that played into whether or not an institution
could survive were (06:39):
their location, rural institutions were particularly vulnerable;
their size, smaller institutions struggled more; and then their focus, comprehensive
four-year institutions tended to fare better unless they were both rural and very small,
those institutions were very vulnerable. It was like a combination of those things. If
(06:59):
you were rural and remote, you're in trouble. If you're rural and very small, you're in trouble.
The other was the focus, four-year institutions tended to be all right. They tended to do okay,
because what we started to see in Korea and Japan is that as there were fewer and fewer
people applying for admission, it was easier to get a position at a four-year institution,
(07:20):
and that a lot of these two-year institutions were almost overflow in the past, where they would take
on students who had wanted to go to a four-year institution but weren't able to get admission,
and so they settled for a two-year option before moving into the workforce. But now,
because there weren't as many students applying, institutions were more willing to take on these
students who otherwise may have gone to a two-year institution, which left two-year institutions
(07:45):
really struggling to get a sufficient number of students to be able to support themselves.
And as you noted with internal migration decisions in the US, with people moving to the south and
west and moving away from rural areas, we're already seeing some colleges being hit. What are
some of the ways in which US colleges have dealt with this, or perhaps failed to deal with this?
(08:06):
I would say that the institutions tend to take three different sort of outlooks
to this issue or this problem of demographic cliff that they see coming. Some institutions
are trying to really cut back to reduce costs, and they use it to justify changes
they make at their institutions, which can be unsettling to faculty. I've seen, for example,
programs merge or programs close where even tenured faculty have lost their positions as
(08:31):
a result of this sort of hard-nosed approach that's being adopted by some administrations,
and then it's justified through the need for cost cutting in anticipation of these changes
that are going to be coming to the institution. Another approach is a sort of like plug your ears
and whistle. Some institutions have just really been kind of hoping for the best in the long run,
and this might have an impact on others, but it's not going to have an impact on us,
(08:53):
and they're just kind of going forward with business as usual. And if the reputation of
the institution is strong enough, then they are likely to come out all right in the end, because
while there might be some displacement in terms of who had gone there before and who goes there now,
in the end, their situation isn't going to change that much from what they've experienced in the
past. And so it's understandable why they would kind of take this sort of rose colored glasses
(09:16):
approach to the situation. And then finally, we're starting to see some institutions who
realize that they're going to need to change, but they're not exactly sure how. And so they're
kind of preparing themselves to be able to change. They're communicating out to faculty,
to staff, and to administrators, that there are challenges coming at us, and we're going to
need to be able to make some changes to how we do things. And so they're starting to instigate, for
(09:39):
example, new thinking about how programs should change and how the structure of the institution
might need to change, and really encouraging, internally, people to prepare themselves for
doing something different so that they can survive in a new environment. And so I would say that's
sort of the third approach, the getting ready approach. The first is really all about cutting,
(10:00):
the second is, “Just forget about it. It'll be okay,” and the third kind of priming the pump,
if you will, for future change that is going to need to happen in higher education institutions.
You noted there are some landscape differences between the US and Korea
and Japan in terms of population density and literally the amount
of land in different spaces. But can you talk about what we can learn from
(10:21):
the experiences in Korea and Japan and ways that we might move forward here?
So I came into this thinking that there would be clear takeaways, but instead it left me feeling
a little nervous about the situation in the United States, because in Korea and Japan,
you had a highly interested government that was pretty deeply involved in maintaining
(10:43):
the stability of higher education, whereas in the United States, the government is much more
remotely involved. They're not really directly getting into the nitty gritty of the provision
of higher education within the country, they're only really indirectly a part of what's going
on. And the good will that we see between higher education in Korea and Japan and the government
(11:04):
doesn't really exist here to that same extent. And so we don't have someone looking after us…
…like a safety net….
…yeah, a safety net. And so the government in Korea and Japan, they created policies
to make mergers more smooth, and they would use Ministry of Education reviews of higher education
institutions to make adjustments to quotas for students at institutions to reduce the impact
(11:29):
of demographic decline across the board, so that was more shared, but also so that institutions
that scored lower on ministry reviews of their institution, or institutions they believed to
have a lower quality were kind of cut off over time from this pool of students, so that there
was a gradual change as time went on. But we don't really have that here. It's much more…
(11:50):
it's a free market, and people go where they want to go, and that can be really destructive, and it
can bring a lot of change from one year to the next year, where institutions expect something,
and then all of a sudden they just don't have enough students to keep going on. And so the
other sort of element of it is that there's a positive public opinion of higher education in
Korea and Japan, the sense that it's a public good that we need, that we can't live without,
(12:14):
and I feel like people are questioning that here in the United States, and so we don't have that
same level of public goodwill to rely on as well. The one exception to that that I have
is that there's a strong connection between alumni and the institutions that come from
here in the United States. So we do see some cases where alumni are sort of riding into the rescue,
like Sweet Briar College, where alumni came together and donated to keep the institution open,
(12:39):
to prevent it from closing. And so we do see some of that grassroots support coming from
people who have a personal connection to the institutions. But I would say that that's going
to be the exception, rather than the rule. It's just, I mean, alumni, you can only ask so much.
Yeah, that's great news. When I was reading your article, I was like, “Oh, yeah, okay…”
One way of addressing this, and many institutions have been, is that we've had a lot of underserved
(13:04):
populations in the US, people from low income communities, people who are first-generation
college students and students from historically underrepresented groups have much lower college
attendance rates, and this is a period of time when the rate of return to higher education
is the highest we've ever seen in the US. But there may also be some political issues there,
(13:26):
because in order to bring in some groups from lower income households, it does require larger
amounts of subsidies, and we're not seeing that same sort of increase. In this political climate,
do you see that as being very likely as perhaps a way of expanding the reach of
higher education and perhaps improving our rates of intergenerational income mobility?
(13:49):
Yeah, I would say one of the unique sort of opportunities available to us here in the
United States is the fact that we have these large pools of people who maybe traditionally
haven't taken part in higher education, and as a result of which we can kind of cater to
bringing in new people into higher ed, bringing in first-generation students, and it's good for
institutions because they can better respond to the fact that they don't have as many applicants
(14:14):
as they had in the past, or they don't have as many students as they had in the past,
and it allows them to support themselves. And it's good for the students, because, as you mentioned,
it opens doors economically to new sort of opportunities available within the US economy
and different lifestyles within different social classes. And so I would say that,
yeah, absolutely, that there is this unique opportunity here in the United States,
(14:38):
but there are certainly challenges. The programs that are designed to help us with retention
and to making adjustments to the way that we do things in higher education to be more responsive
to the needs of students who are coming from a first-generation background are the very programs
that are under threat now with the change that we've seen politically within the United States.
(14:59):
And so this lifeline that we had is at real risk now because all of the effort
that we've put into making higher education a more open and welcoming place to people coming
from backgrounds that traditionally didn't take part in higher education may feel less
welcome as a result of a lot of these programs being shut down. In fact, I'm working on a study
(15:20):
now on the impact of DEI programs having been made illegal in the state of Texas,
and how that's impacted the student experience there. And so I'm very interested to see what
sort of results we get from that study. But I have a feeling that it's not going to be all good news.
One of the other areas for potential enrollment growth that's been discussed
quite a bit in the US is the admission of more international students. There's a lot
(15:44):
of desire for international students to get US education, but you note that the political
climate has become less welcoming. What's the future of this looking like right now?
And this wasn't true, not just in the US, but also Korea and Japan sought to attract more
international students. They saw it as a potential way to respond to declining numbers of domestic
(16:04):
students and provide support to institutions, and some institutions were quite successful in being
able to draw international students. I wouldn't say that higher education across the board really
succeeded in Korea and Japan, but there were some key institutions that really excelled at this,
and it became a niche for them that allowed them to sort of weather the storm. Here in
the United States, I would say that we've always been a top choice destination for
(16:26):
international students around the world. And so it's pretty clear that we could rely on this,
or it was pretty clear we could rely on this in the past, but what we've seen is that there was
kind of an unfortunate mix of developments that occurred within the country that have made us less
attractive as a destination. The first of which that comes to mind would be just COVID-19 really
(16:49):
tarnished the image of the United States, just in the response and in a sense of sort of chaos
that students felt while they were here in the United States. That they communicated back home,
a sense of lawlessness, almost in the country, that this is a place where people don't follow
the rules and where there isn't sort of a clear, organized response to issues or
(17:11):
problems as they emerge, and that was very bad for U.S. higher education, just because
that type of damage to a country's image is very difficult to come back from. It lingers.
It's almost generational change when people shift in their view of a particular country,
and so that plays into decisions around where to go to study. And then the other you sort of
(17:34):
alluded to is political change, and I don't think it's as simple as just a shift in administration,
but we've witnessed in the public discourse a real change in how people talk and think about
people who are coming to the United States from other countries, and people feel that,
they feel that they hear it in the discourse. And you know when you're not welcome,
you know you're visiting someone's house, and you hear them talking about you in the kitchen, and
(17:56):
they're not saying nice things, unless you really, really want to be there, you're just less likely
to stick around. And I think that that has really contributed as well to this decline we're seeing
in the numbers of international students who have come to the United States. And so again, there's
always going to be institutions that because due to their reputation or due to their location,
are still going to draw on a large number of students. But it's not going to be a safety net
(18:19):
for institutions who are most vulnerable to this decline, places that are located in rural areas or
who are specialized in a particular academic area, or institutions that are very small, these are
the places that are the least likely to attract international students, and so it's just not a
good solution, or it's not the solution that many had hoped that it would be, at least at this time.
(18:41):
One other thing you talk about in your paper a little bit is shifting the focus
of the course offerings and the focus of the programs offered by institutions.
Can you talk a little bit about how that's been done in Korea and Japan,
and whether institutions here are already starting to do this a bit, and perhaps, might that be a way
of maintaining the relevance and the strength of a larger proportion of higher ed institutions?
(19:05):
I think institutions are still trying to figure out how they can change the curriculum to make
them fit into the society that we live in. And we see pressure on institutions coming
from the labor market and then from this new discourse around accountability for
institutions in terms of student outcomes in the labor market. And it makes me a little nervous,
to be honest. I'm not sure that it's necessarily a good thing, and in Korea, at least, I don't know
(19:29):
about this as much in Japan, but in Korea, we saw things like funding for our departments being tied
to the percentage of students who were full-time employed with benefits a certain amount of time
after graduation, and that funding levels for departments would shift to the point that even
positions could go away. If you cannot provide successful employment outcomes for students,
(19:55):
then the justification for that program or for those positions might go away. And so
that created a lot of discomfort among faculty and among administrators who really felt the
squeeze in terms of everything we do has to be targeted in some way to a particular job,
and we need to be preparing students in some way for work. Everything we do has
(20:16):
to be focused on getting students ready for work. And I think that that's disruptive and
not helpful for higher education. I think that those things are absolutely very important,
but that they fly in the face of the mission of a lot of higher education institutions,
and that there's a real danger of losing touch with the original purpose of these institutions.
(20:37):
And so I would say that I think I much more appreciate the efforts to just prepare people for
change without necessarily knowing which direction we're going to be headed, because otherwise, some
of this is quite disruptive and it's destructive as well. It makes me a little bit nervous.
Given your experience, what role do you see faculty
(20:58):
playing in shaping the future change that needs to come?
Well, in some places, we are seeing faculty taking a more proactive role in creating new
programs and to creating even new schools. So I don't know if you've heard much about, I believe
it's Arizona State University, they have, like a School of Ocean Futures and some pretty new sort
(21:20):
of ways of organizing what the programs that are available at the institution with a clear
focus on the future. So that they're hopeful that students that come out of these programs
are able to find a place in the future world, at least as they envision it. And so I think faculty
members who sort of take the lead in this work and help to sort of reorganize higher education
(21:40):
around what might be needed in the future, they have a role to play there if they're able to do
that. But in a lot of cases, faculty members are very resistant to any sort of change, and so,
in fact, they've kind of become antagonists to any of this work. And I understand that. Higher
education looked a certain way for a very long time, and that's what people sort of
(22:00):
envision it’s going to continue to look like in the future, and they are cynical about any sort
of changes that others are trying to impose on higher education, and maybe rightly so.
And one of the ways, I think that we've seen that in the wider universe of colleges and
universities is gutting some of the traditional liberal arts departments and majors. We've seen
some schools give up music departments or give up art departments, or art history,
(22:25):
or sometimes seriously cutting back on history or math and other areas. I gather that that's
something you probably would not advocate for as part of this transition to the future.
Liberal arts institutions are the greatest threat is the reality of it. So the institutions that
we've seen closing in the Northeast in particular have been small liberal arts institutions,
(22:46):
and so I am very much in favor of the mission of these liberal arts institutions, personally.
But if people aren't going because that's not what they're looking for in higher education,
then the problem we have isn't with the programs we're offering. There's a program with what people
perceive as being valuable in the society and how social values have changed over time, that
(23:06):
people aren't interested in learning about music and they're not interested in learning art, and
that's, to me, is terrifying, but it's the reality of what we're seeing in terms of demand is that
people want this very clear economic benefit as a result of attending higher education, and if they
don't see a clear one-to-one correlation, that they tend to be more dismissive of it as something
that's not necessary or something that they don't need, which creates a lot of this pressure,
(23:30):
and it's used to justify things like gutting out some of these programs like you mentioned. I think
higher education has grown dangerously sort of disconnected from public life, and that people
see higher education institutions as something that's very removed and something that's stuck in
the past and something that isn't really tied to sort of public opinion and the public discourse,
(23:52):
and that puts us in such a dangerous position, and so that really, really makes me worry about the
future for higher education, because there isn't a clear vision about where do we fit in the society
of the future, what role do we play? And we're becoming increasingly vestigial, almost, in the
way that people talk about and think about higher education, in a way that leaves me very worried.
(24:12):
That seems like the critical difference too, that you identified in your study, really between the
differences between Korea and Japan too, right? Is that really how it played out?
And even at a personal level, I could feel the difference working in higher education as a
faculty member in South Korea. In society, I was awarded a certain amount of respect from anybody
(24:32):
who learned that I was a professor or a faculty member, and people would seek out my opinion or
seek out my participation in programs in a way that I just don't see here in the United States.
In a way, when people learn I'm a professor in the United States, their response is very
different from in Korea, and that was sort of a warning bell for me in terms of, this is how they
see higher education here. It's very different from what I had experienced in other settings.
(24:57):
And on that cheery note… you had mentioned the shift out of the Midwest and the Northeast into
other regions of the country. So what types of differences do you see between the experience
of the Midwest and the New England region in terms of the response to these shifts?
So I would say that the sort of the major difference that we see between the Northeast
(25:19):
and the Midwest is that in the northeast, there were more successful mergers, and that has to do
with the fact that there is less distance between institutions in the northeast, it is a little
bit more densely populated, and so oftentimes the institutions that were having trouble were
able to reach out to neighboring institutions, especially smaller institutions, would reach out
to larger neighboring institutions, and they were able to come to some sort of agreement where they
(25:42):
would merge. There's one exception to this in the Northeast, where two similarly sized institutions,
neither of which were struggling, this was Berklee College of Music and then the Boston Conservatory,
they just spoke with each other and decided we should share these overhead costs that we're
dealing with, and we'll become one music institution within Boston, and otherwise,
it tended to be smaller institutions that were struggling reaching out to larger neighbors
(26:05):
and getting some help and becoming a part of that larger neighbor. And oftentimes they would fill in
sort of an area of relative weakness within that larger institution. Something that comes to mind,
for example, is Wheelock College joining Boston University and becoming sort of the specialized
college in education and human services within Boston University. And so there were some pretty
(26:25):
happy stories there about mergers working out. It was more remote, small liberal arts
institutions in the Northeast that were the most likely to close, and that contrasted a little
with the eastern Midwest, where a lot of the times we saw religious affiliated institutions were the
ones that were struggling. There were quite a few Christian colleges that weren't able to find a way
(26:46):
forward. And in terms of the mergers that we saw, they tended to be highly specialized institutions
that were sort of gobbled up by neighbors that didn't have a program or any offerings in that
area, and saw it as an opportunity to expand out what they offered at their institutions.
So the stories were pretty similar, but there were some differences in terms of the success
(27:07):
rate of mergers and the types of institutions that were struggling in those different regions.
Well, with all that good news today, we always end by asking, what's next?
This was a very, sort of a zoomed out look at what's going on here in the United States. And
I think that there's some real value in taking a closer look at the stories of these institutions,
(27:27):
those that do end up closing and then those that are able to make it through. And so I'm
hoping to do a series of comparative case studies looking at institutions
around the Northeast. There's even one that's quite close to us here in Aurora,
New York. I think it's Well’s and so I'm hoping to take a closer look at some of
these institutions and their stories but haven't decided the exact sort of focus I want to take.
(27:49):
But part of me wants to look at the impact on the local economies of places that do close.
What's the sort of impact that we're seeing on the people that live around the places where
these institutions used to be located, and the places that do succeed, what role did their
relationships to their local community play in their ability to kind of make it through and so
I’m still in the brainstorming phase there, but this is something I've been thinking about doing.
(28:12):
Well, thank you. This has been such a cheery conversation, but it's one that all institutions
have to address, because we are going to be coming up to some really challenging times,
and if higher ed institutions are to survive, they're going to have to be a little bit creative
and maybe more flexible in terms of addressing the changing environment in which we're living.
But studies such as this, though, can perhaps give us more information about what paths
(28:36):
have been successful. So thank you, and we're looking forward to hearing your future studies.
Thank you, and thanks for having me on.
Yeah, thanks for the zoomed out look. I think that's helpful for everyone to get a good grasp
on what the landscape really looks like and how it does compare to some other places.
(28:56):
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