America’s Birth Crisis Is Shutting Down Schools and Colleges at a Shocking Rate
When Whitney Houston sang, “I believe that children are our future,” it may not have been truly profound, but it was true. A quick headcount of American schools and colleges, in fact, proves just how true.
Education Week recently reported that public schools across the nation are closing their doors due to a lack of students. The hundreds of school closures in the pandemic years reflect a net loss of around 1.2 million students, and experts project enrollment will fall another 2.7 million students by 2032.
The lack of students is partly due to parents opting for homeschooling or private schools and partly due to a migration from urban to suburban school districts. The most important factor, however, is the consequence of decades of low birth rates.
Americans started having a lot fewer babies around 2007, and fertility has not recovered. Each year since, fewer and fewer elementary, middle, and high schoolers have boarded school buses. This year, the American birth dearth turned 18, which means colleges and universities are beginning to feel the pinch. This “demographic cliff” will likely spell the end of a large segment of American higher education.
Declining enrollment has already proved fatal for many institutions. According to an NPR report, in the first half of 2024, “more than a college a week announced that it would close,” and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia projects that college closures will accelerate in the years to come.
This is the cold, hard demographic reality. After all, the class of 2025 is made up of the babies of 2007, so we know what lies ahead. The number of 18-year-olds graduating from American high schools is expected to tumble 13% by 2041, and with birth rates still at historic lows, there’s no obvious end to this trend in sight.
Christian colleges will also be affected, as will areas of culture beyond higher ed. Fewer college graduates (and young adults overall) mean a smaller workforce, a shrinking economy, and less expertise and vitality. Ultimately, that means an aging and declining society. As one research professor at Georgetown University put it, “If we don’t keep our edge in innovation and college-level education, we’ll have a decline in the economy and ultimately a decline in the living standard.” For perspective, we need only look at Japan, where 30% of the population is already over 65, today’s young people may never be able to retire, and nearly 40% of towns are in danger of simply disappearing.
In other words, the rapid contraction of higher education is itself a sign of things to come. Old people need young people, and at this stage, tens of thousands of farmers, nurses, doctors, civil engineers, mechanics, pastors, and taxpayers whom aging Americans count on, whether they realize it or not, simply are not there. They were never born.
So, what can we do? Books have been written and policies proposed about making children more economically and socially feasible. The most important advice is found in the title of a recent book by Brad Wilcox of Institute for Family Studies: Get Married. The decline of marriage is the main cause of the decline in childbearing.
Of course, getting more people hitched now won’t make an immediate difference in college enrollment or other macro-level trends. Still, as the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.
Of all the things our culture values, of all the resources or means of power, from education to various forms of wealth, nothing is as important as human beings. People are the ultimate resource. Without them, the life expectancy of institutions and societies is measured in decades.
A sane and healthy society will recognize this and will prize the family as a result. Investing in the wellbeing and thriving of children must begin with the love and moral formation of mothers and fathers. This centers the needs of those children, rather than the desires of adults, as the highest cultural values. This kind of society follows both the “creation mandate,” to be fruitful, to multiply, and to fill and subdue the earth, and the second Great Commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself”—beginning with the neighbors who will inherit the world we shape.
Many of the colleges that will close probably deserve it. But in another 18 years, the stakes will be much higher than filling college dorms and will depend on how seriously our generation took this obvious truth. Children really are our future.
Photo Courtesy: ©Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash
Published Date: February 20, 2025
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
