Higher Education 2015: How Will the Future Shake Out?

This article discusses the future of higher education in the United States. When people contemplate the future, they rarely do so with any balance. It is utopia or dystopia. So it is with higher education. The freshmen of 2015 were born in 1997. 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--then begin to recede. For most of the forthcoming decade, then, the volume demands on higher education will be greater than ever before. 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 African American, 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.