I really appricate your time in watching my video on why college towns are disappearing, but I also appreciate your support in following Something Different Films for nearly two years now.
I live in a college town. This is what i have noticed in the past five years: Housing is astronomical. No one can afford yo live here except college students (many crammed into an off campus converted house) and older retired folks. Therefore, there has become a few things that have evolved: 1. Self segregation between the young and old. 2. Young families can't afford to live here. 3. Less school aged children mean shrinking schools and neighborhood life. I have concluded we no longer live in a college town, but a retirement community that happens to host a university.
Should be top comment. In Canada we FLOODED the country with international students to make up for our demographic bust (and consequent decline of university student population) and rents are through the roof and people are sharing bunk beds.
@@markanderson7236 not a bot. I just type my comments, rather then text them. This particular topic (college town collapse) is something I understand because I'm living in the midst of a college town collapse
I have been to Lawrence KS and Chapel Hill NC and Ann Arbor MI in the past year. Those big-time college towns are not just surviving but thriving. They are all becoming retirement destinations for alumni who graduated 45 years before and now want to settle down to live out their golden years in places with good medical centers, interesting culture and food scenes, and sports to cheer for.
Furthermore, tons of federal money is pumped into the amenities and infrastructure within campus and around the top college towns. IMO, it's some of the best real estate that currently exists in the USA.
To be fair, Ann Arbor is close to Detroit, and Chapel Hill is in the heart of Research Triangle. When I think of college towns, I think of Balcksburg, VA, or Strarkville, MS, places not really near a big city. Those places don’t have the job prospects
Short version: Schools got too expensive and overused. So now, less people are going, and they don't want to pay so much. A natural correction to a market that is overgrown and overpriced. There are going to be some lean years for the lower ranked schools until enough close so the numbers balance out again.
Sure thing Milton Friedman, now what about the people who live in the communities where colleges are going away permanently as a result of this contraction.
@@JamesR1986they are just as vulnerable as small towns all over the world that really on one industry. Many ghost towns were born from that. The business leaves and so do the people. Not that their suffering shouldn’t be addressed and prevented.
@@JamesR1986 perhaps they should coin a word similar to "rust belt" to describe their communities. Or, re-think what their colleges look like, and how to attract more students. Four years of "liberal arts" with partying and political indoctrination, with low pay and limited job prospects just doesn't sell as well as it used to. These colleges need to start looking at the business models of the thriving schools - like the new "College of St. Joseph the Worker" - and think outside the box at how they can re-invent themselves.
@@annai157First problem was thinking schools should follow a business model. For-profit schools consistently cost far more and offer the same or worse programs and results than public ones. In most countries the public ones are always preferred; business will never work in education
@@bobsteve4812 He didn't say it had to become a for-profit, but even non-profits have business models. Would calling it an "organizational" model trigger you less?
as a current college student i prefer having access to jobs. its much easier in somewhere like louisville or pittsburgh than somewhere like clarion or moorehead
I just graduated a few years ago and I’ll give my perspective on this and that’s that it doesn’t matter. And yes I use my degree. The issue I see is that people move to these big city colleges wrack up a ton of debt on living expenses and then struggle for years to pay it off. In contrast I went to a schools in middle of nowhere and my debts were low, got a job and now I can live life.
@@voiceofreason2674 wasn’t the determining factor for me. but the town absolutely is a factor, and jobs are a big part of that. especially if you need to work your way through college
@@ninjagirl226That depends on the school though. The vast majority of these small schools in my state are overpriced private liberal arts schools in the middle of nowhere, where you’re almost always paying more than you would at the major public universities in big cities
I graduated from a PennWest college a year after the merger. A grocery store near campus closed in my last semester, officially making the town a food desert. Students only other option is a walmart miles outside the town by the highway. It's sad wondering if my alma mater may even exist in the next 10 years. Even sadder because the faculty and support on these campuses are wonderful and it is such a beautiful small town.
The other day I was reading a news article about how America doesn’t have enough STEM students and therefore we need to incentivize foreign students to fill these slots. All I could think about is how all of this could be fixed by making school affordable.
"America doesn't have enough STEM students" that's BS. They treat us horribly and want to dilute the pool even more. Out of all the STEM jobs I've applied to in the last 6 years less than 10 have given me an interview and 0 hired. America's employers are some of the most ungrateful and spoiled in the first world.
OP, are u asserting that American kids don’t do STEM in college because it’s too expensive? I think the point about STEM is about kids already enrolled in college yet choosing to major in anything else BUT stem.
I grew up near Princeton, NJ, and could never believe it's a college town. My friend goes there and flat out has told me he can't go into town to do anything because even a basic lunch costs $20. Personally, I've always joked that Princeton is the only college town that has a Rolex store right across the street from the main campus gate-look it up, it's true. I go to school in Amherst, MA (my school is actually in the stock footage from 6:07 - 6:19!) and we're much more normal in that sense, though rents here are through the roof due to overenrollment in the local colleges. UMass and Amherst College, at the very least, are thriving, and there's constant new construction and restaurants everywhere, even though we're in the middle of nowhere Western Massachusetts. It's such a striking difference.
Western Mass is an entirely different animal, in my opinion, with numerous prestigious private colleges combined with a massive public university like UMass within the region. Places like Williams, Amherst (College), Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Hampshire, etc. will not lose popularity anytime soon.
I spent a weekend in Princeton, there are some trust fund baby bidnesses, but the hotel was just $109 and there and lunch was pretty much the same price as anywhere else.
I was a faculty member at one of the universities that merged with clarion. It was a mess and I left as soon as they announced it. But, I can attest, these towns are barren and there is nothing to do at them. Students, if they have the option in western Pennsylvania might as well go to places like Pitt, Penn State, or IUP.
They raised the drinking age from 18 to 21, and all (well most) of the bars and nightclubs catering to college students closed. That's what college student used do in these towns!!! I'm not arguing that is was the right or wrong thing to do (i don't drink myself), just pointing out why they're so barren and boring now from what we remember....
Penn State enrollment has declined the last few years. Not a problem in State College but at the satellite campuses around the state. Pennsylvania in general has an older declining population and people here are having fewer kids and if they do raise their kids here they seem to leave for other places. PA is a paradise on earth for me. I love the mountains; the scenery, the cooler weather and lack of traffic. These small towns in PA are really quite isolated for young people; not enough to do. State College is totally different. It truly has everything as well as Pittsburgh and Philly. This is definitely more of location and demographics issue than anything at least in PA
College towns are disappearing because the lines have become so blurred as to what exactly a college is. A hundred years ago college was a rich kids' playground. In the mid-20th century there was an effort to democratize higher education with relatively low-priced community colleges (paperback colleges, they were called). This became so successful that trade schools got into the act by acquiring football teams and private publishing presses and rebranding themselves colleges (and charging proportionately higher tuitions), in much the same way Disneyland now calls itself a resort. Subsequently, a lot of people think they went to college, but they really didn't, a degree from Plainwrap University somehow not being held in the same regard as one from Stanford.
If its an undergrad degree, it litterally is. Theres nothing distinguishing them. Their both equally degrees. The problem is, we exported all the normal jobs to overpopulated countries like india/china. So now everybody living in the same feudal squalor that they are. We wouldn't need so many people going into college, if we had good paying factory jobs too. Seriously 4 months of wages from a ford factory back then, could get you a whole car.
Cambridge doesn’t behave like a typical college town. It’s a city of over 100,000, home to a massive amount of biotech and other jobs that are fueled by Harvard and (especially) MIT’s presence and alumni base. The same can be said about the Research Triangle in North Carolina, where Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill are located. You’ll likely see more larger college towns try and follow this route to boost their economies and get more people to stay there beyond their college years.
Lets take the most broke and poor demographic in the US, and force them into apartments that they have no hope of living in. What an amazing idea dude. This will surely workout. They need to spam apartments in these college towns and fix the fucking housing crisis. This is pure insanity. Nobody can afford shit
I have lived in two college towns as a non-student, and it sucked. Both were home to major universities, and so entwined were the local governments, the schools and the economies that locals were a tertiary consideration, and had to subsume themselves to the whims of the student population.
That’s precisely part of the problem! Distance ed students don’t help local communities very much b/c they aren’t physically present, “dropping” money at the local businesses and invigorating the communities.
@nondescriptnyc Not everyone is willing/able to put his/her life on hold for four years. I read, for example, of a HS Latin teacher in Wyoming who earned a master's from a university in Ohio. Without distance learning she would have had to quit her job & move to Ohio. I, myself earned a CAS from Clarion (24 gsh post master's) online while working full time & taking care of a father with Altzheimers. Without DL this would have been IMPOSSIBLE. DL XXL blessing for those who can't put their lives on hold to improve themselves.
@@brucealanwilson4121 I think you might have missed the entire point of this news report. Nobody is talking about the value of distance education WHATSOEVER, as that is not the point of this discussion at all. This discussion is strictly about the economic and other contributions made by institutions of higher education to the local communities. I am sure, with the highly respected Clarion distance education, you are able to discern the two. Let us not conflate these two separate issues here.
One interesting aspect of the town vs gown debate is local elections. Here in Texas you can switch your registration from your home town to your college town, which means you are suddenly voting on local issues that will cease becoming your worry once you graduate. This makes things like bond issues for schools weirdly abstract to a voting student who might be gone once the bond issue hits the books, and also makes it aggravating to folks on fixed incomes who have to swallow the tax increases.
I went to a decently large college about an hour from Pittsburgh. The town was incredibly depressing and if you wanted to do anything other than party, then you would have to drive to the city. In fact, that is what most students did. I transferred out of the school for a plethora of reasons, but one of them was that I didn't want to live in a dying and depressing town.
For prestige universities/colleges, no. For large state flagship unis (Michigan, PSU, UCLA etc) no. Privates who lack a very good-excellent academic reputation will just close before they lower prices. Places like Clarion (a no frills state teachers college) are getting market corrected by community colleges, lack of population growth and smaller and smaller state funding for tuition. Education is expensive because unlike the factories we can't outsource it to China. But good news, we are trying!
@@rook1196 An interesting note on the China side-They're trying to become a global education hub and are giving scholarships for foreigners who wish to study in mainland China.
When I started my undergraduate studies, I spent two years at SUNY Stony Brook. Stony Brook, Suffolk Co. is basically a college town, but I don’t think that it specifically will be threatened by the dynamics of the schools discussed in this video. It could happen at some point in the future though…
I've noticed the same undeniable trend happening in America over the last few decades - one specific thing that is causing all of this - concentration of wealth. I feel like these universities are closing because the gluttonous wasteful spending of modern academia just cannot be sustained once they've extracted all the wealth from the student body, especially now that we know that their degrees are basically worthless, or not worth enough to pay for the ungodly excessive cost to attend the place. These institutions can't exist if they lose money... same with the corporations that their students will work for and supposedly demand higher salaries from... but corporatism is ruining the world, so why would they allow some of their profits to go to employees and the institution they studied at?
Bingo. Mass wealth inequality is one the major problems that is rarely ever talked about. We can't expect a sustainable society by impoverishing so many people at the behest of a few greedy rich people. Sooner or later, the society breaks apart.
I was not expecting clarion in this video. The school’s tuition is not worth it so many people aren’t bothering to go there. When i applied it cost like 90 dollars for just the application fee. PA as a whole is so expensive for colleges, so why go to a school like Calu or Clarion when its just as expensive as a Penn state or Pitt branch campus, which offer better degrees
As a community college student going into university in a couple of semesters I need a place that I can easily get a job due to my family’s lack of income and not some place where job opportunities lack so if I have to go to a college town it would be someplace a couple minutes away from a urban area rather than these places you listed where they are hours from job opportunities
2:05 What is a "Bachelorette" degree? Overall this content was very good - but this word used this way made me wonder if the content is AI generated & unedited?
It's kinda weird calling Fairfield AL a small college town. It's a suburb. Some of the entrances to Miles are pointed more towards Birmingham a block away than to Fairfield.
such a fascinating topic that's universal. i think of college towns as part of a bigger picture and if that bigger picture begins to crumble then everything around it does too. economically, times are tough and people want to save so they cut back which seems to include going to school. i do think politics play a role too, but probably more anecdotal because of how certain aspects like technology are shaping their environment and how they develop from that.
Everything cost extremely expensive. I'm one of the people reconsidering not getting marriage, having children, and attending a 4 - year university. It's insane.
It's just a historic map, last time I choose a map based just on how unique I think it looks. I should have realized something was off when I saw that it had just one Dakota. As there was never a single Dakota state, North and South were admitted at the same time.
WSU should take notes from their neighbors over in Idaho. Their enrollment has gone up despite the slaughter of those 4 students that made national headlines.
Some of these, maybe a lot of these, closed colleges were not very good, even the nonprofit ones. I come from a rural state that had enough of them. Just wasted time, so many of them. Plus, man, you don’t want to live in most of those towns.
Unfortunately the liberal geniuses behind most west coast cities decided to give away all our equivalents to steel mills, to fucking india/china. So really there aint much keeping us alive
The reality of many of these small colleges is that all they were was ‘screening’ for prospective employers to ensure they were literate. I know this because I worked along side people with degrees in psychology, drama, English Literature etc in a factory. Now that these jobs have been outsourced, there is less employment opportunities available for them.
I HAVE AN IDEA. 9 quadrillion indians and Chinese to immigrate here, and lets send the few jobs we have, to india/china aswell. I love dealing with the overpopulation problems of another country. China/India arent more efficient when it comes to manufacturing. They dont produce stuff cheaper. The only advantage they have, is the fact human life there is cheaper than a chatgpt subscription. Its insane how we dont have overpopulation tariffs. All western countries should have tariffs that apply to the population density of a country. Its not fair in the slightest.
Sane here in Ohio. Cedarville University is busting st the seams eith a continuous wave of endowments and constructions while Urbana U diversity struggled, was bought put by Franklin University and closed. Conservatives have pushed the narrative of the uselessness of liberal arts colleges and touted faith-based colleges. Even our historic Antioch University, alma mater to Ms. Corretta Scott King and Rod Serling fell victim to declining enrollment and closed for four years. New endowments were set-up and the university opened as a smaller version of itself. Enrollment has been steadily increasing.
The thing about the east coast is there's a lot of random colleges and universities. Not all of them are good besides taking tuition money. Hence, don't go to a school in some backwoods town or live in a nothing special town.
WSU is interesting because it's a small rural wheat farming town with a major state university, literally in the middle of nowhere, about a 1 1/2 hours drive to any major population center. The town is an anomaly that shouldn't even exist.
Good. An entire generation+ of 18-year-olds was fed the lie that a 4-year college degree (or even a master’s!) was essential for survival and thus worth as much as the mortgage on a house. It was never either of these things. It is useful if you are truly determined to work and talented in the fields of medicine, lawyering, or education, but there are also plenty of degrees you can get much quicker and cheaper that will give you a foothold in these areas, and many others, to boot! 👍
From a parent's point of view the colleges are 1) getting too expensive, 2) graduating students who haven't learned a marketable skill (i.e. useless degrees), and 3) becoming institutions of indoctrination rather than learning. This is something parents are choosing not to fund.
science and technology innovation already takes place in the secular and civilized world now, far away from the failing occidental countries. US population needs to drop a little more and can be turned into nature reserve, don't expect much more from them as they fade away
there is absolutely, positively, no freakin way that the average college spends 11,000 dollars per student a year, thats an absurdly high number that surely has a lot of "Hollywood accounting" factored in. At the very least it's massively skewed towards the amounts those same "noisy few" mentioned at the start of the video spend. And it's not like it's even per student, it's just the average being misleading in multiple statistics leading to a massive compounding of misleading. A school with a sports team spends countless millions on it's sports programs when only a small fraction of it's student body actually uses the money it's spending on those athletes and then you take those schools skewed average per student and it further skews the average spent across all colleges. If you were to look at the average that small schools without Ivy League prestige or massive sports programs spends per student I wouldn't be surprised if it's as much as 75% less than that 11,000 number.
Ha!! I was just joking with someone a few days ago about Athens, WV being a "college town". Nobody anywhere I go knows about Concord. It's a great school. Athens the "college town" had a grand total of 1 stoplight and 1 pharmacy and a few churches and that was it. There was a gas station but it was technically just outside city limits. I get excited when someone knows about it. I was there from 2002-2007
Lol the map also merges 2 other states that should really be just one. New Hampshire and Vermont (actually all those should be New England with Ct, Ma, Me and Ri). Wyoming should be with Co. and DC is just a city in Maryland!
Why don't they take in more international students when enrollment of American students is shrinking? International students pay all of their tuition themselves and if they could stay in America after the end of their education they will be skilled and highly skilled immigrants.
They take as many internationals who can afford it as they possibly can. If your parents can pay 70k dollars a year then you have to be an idiot to not get accepted. I worked in admissions at a major USA university.
Many of the bigger schools are doing that. The U of Washington was already doing that back when I went in the late 1980s early 1990s. I am not sure how supportive these small schools could be for those types of students due to the lack of infrastructure and even cultural differences in some places.
@@literatinyc Dear friend, This is not true because talented international students all know American schools very well and all wish to study there The problem is in the immigration system of USA which does not allow them to easily enter USA and study and stay there after they finish their education so educated, legal and qualified immigrants and students cant enter and stay in USA but millions of illegal ones can do!
@@killbaal4149 Dear friend, there are millions of talented students all around the world that wish to study in American schools, universities and higher education systems and even in small schools but the immigration and visa laws and policies does not allow them to do that. Cultural differences are not important because most of the people of the world and particularly the educated, smart and talented people admire the American culture and can easily get assimilated into it.
The world is becoming more urbanized, making small towns obsolete for the most part. Towns should be incentivizing people to live there, but instead greed rules the day so the towns rot away while the local townspeople wonder what happened.
This narrator dude needs an education. "...with about 8 million pursuing a 'bachelorette'"? Try making that a four year bachelor's degree. Obviously he didn't earn such a degree and spent way too much time spent watching 'reality' TV.
This is sad. It would be great if someone could explain "why", because I know it's complicated.In California, UCs and state schools used to be free. Republicans changed that, I'm not sure why.
Clarion is a generic college offering a generic degree. They couldn’t compete with underwater basket weaving at “bigger generic college.” These universities did this to themselves. Figure it out 🍻
Much of the problem is that the "small, liberal arts college" is an outdated model. Parents don't want to take out exorbitant loans to send their kids to party for 4 (or 5) years, live in "co-ed" dorms in which immorality is rampant, study more high school level content, receive political indoctrination, and then only be eligible for employment at at pay level they could have gotten with just high school. Offering more workforce focused degrees, at better prices, and limiting the self-destructive student behavior & political indoctrination *could* bring back some of these schools. Universities forgot that the *parents* are their real customers - if parents aren't on-board, students in their late teens aren't likely to be able to attend these schools.
Simple solution: transfer to one of the Ivy League schools. Education is largely signaling rather than substantive so this is a win if you can pull it off.
No point in going, it's so overpriced and you're not guaranteed a good job anymore. I dropped out after a semester, and I have a better job than probably every "gender studies" graduated ever 😂😂😂.
This situation is where the survival of the fittest meets supply and demand. It's all that simple at it's core. One rule for selecting a college: Don't go to a college where nobody outside of a 100-mile radius has even heard of the college. The ROI (return on investment) will be negligible to non-existent.
I really appricate your time in watching my video on why college towns are disappearing, but I also appreciate your support in following Something Different Films for nearly two years now.
I live in a college town. This is what i have noticed in the past five years:
Housing is astronomical. No one can afford yo live here except college students (many crammed into an off campus converted house) and older retired folks.
Therefore, there has become a few things that have evolved:
1. Self segregation between the young and old.
2. Young families can't afford to live here.
3. Less school aged children mean shrinking schools and neighborhood life.
I have concluded we no longer live in a college town, but a retirement community that happens to host a university.
Should be top comment. In Canada we FLOODED the country with international students to make up for our demographic bust (and consequent decline of university student population) and rents are through the roof and people are sharing bunk beds.
Why do these comments sound like they were written by bots?
@@markanderson7236 not a bot. I just type my comments, rather then text them.
This particular topic (college town collapse) is something I understand because I'm living in the midst of a college town collapse
@@markanderson7236Because you’re grasping at straws in an attempt to discount the legitimacy of their comment.
@@impulse_xs I didn't read all the comments, nor did I try to understand them fully. The sentence structure just seemed robotic to me.
I have been to Lawrence KS and Chapel Hill NC and Ann Arbor MI in the past year. Those big-time college towns are not just surviving but thriving. They are all becoming retirement destinations for alumni who graduated 45 years before and now want to settle down to live out their golden years in places with good medical centers, interesting culture and food scenes, and sports to cheer for.
Furthermore, tons of federal money is pumped into the amenities and infrastructure within campus and around the top college towns. IMO, it's some of the best real estate that currently exists in the USA.
ann arbor is one of the nicest towns in michigan. it's expensive.
To be fair, Ann Arbor is close to Detroit, and Chapel Hill is in the heart of Research Triangle.
When I think of college towns, I think of Balcksburg, VA, or Strarkville, MS, places not really near a big city. Those places don’t have the job prospects
@WoodyJ98 what about Lawrence, KS?
@@RoyceBenning That's about as close to Kansas City as Ann Arbor is to Detroit. It's a 40 min drive to the KC airport.
Short version: Schools got too expensive and overused.
So now, less people are going, and they don't want to pay so much. A natural correction to a market that is overgrown and overpriced.
There are going to be some lean years for the lower ranked schools until enough close so the numbers balance out again.
Sure thing Milton Friedman, now what about the people who live in the communities where colleges are going away permanently as a result of this contraction.
@@JamesR1986they are just as vulnerable as small towns all over the world that really on one industry. Many ghost towns were born from that. The business leaves and so do the people. Not that their suffering shouldn’t be addressed and prevented.
@@JamesR1986 perhaps they should coin a word similar to "rust belt" to describe their communities. Or, re-think what their colleges look like, and how to attract more students. Four years of "liberal arts" with partying and political indoctrination, with low pay and limited job prospects just doesn't sell as well as it used to. These colleges need to start looking at the business models of the thriving schools - like the new "College of St. Joseph the Worker" - and think outside the box at how they can re-invent themselves.
@@annai157First problem was thinking schools should follow a business model. For-profit schools consistently cost far more and offer the same or worse programs and results than public ones. In most countries the public ones are always preferred; business will never work in education
@@bobsteve4812 He didn't say it had to become a for-profit, but even non-profits have business models. Would calling it an "organizational" model trigger you less?
as a current college student i prefer having access to jobs. its much easier in somewhere like louisville or pittsburgh than somewhere like clarion or moorehead
I just graduated a few years ago and I’ll give my perspective on this and that’s that it doesn’t matter. And yes I use my degree.
The issue I see is that people move to these big city colleges wrack up a ton of debt on living expenses and then struggle for years to pay it off. In contrast I went to a schools in middle of nowhere and my debts were low, got a job and now I can live life.
Another set of comments appeared to be written by bots.
I get preferring a bigger city but a JOB being the deciding factor is crazy
@@voiceofreason2674 wasn’t the determining factor for me. but the town absolutely is a factor, and jobs are a big part of that. especially if you need to work your way through college
@@ninjagirl226That depends on the school though. The vast majority of these small schools in my state are overpriced private liberal arts schools in the middle of nowhere, where you’re almost always paying more than you would at the major public universities in big cities
I graduated from a PennWest college a year after the merger. A grocery store near campus closed in my last semester, officially making the town a food desert. Students only other option is a walmart miles outside the town by the highway. It's sad wondering if my alma mater may even exist in the next 10 years. Even sadder because the faculty and support on these campuses are wonderful and it is such a beautiful small town.
Did you go to CalU? It was so dead, I graduated the year before the merger. Apparently lots of people were getting ready to leave after the merger.
Edinboro? I've been there, I could tell it was a nice town back but it's quite sad now.
The other day I was reading a news article about how America doesn’t have enough STEM students and therefore we need to incentivize foreign students to fill these slots. All I could think about is how all of this could be fixed by making school affordable.
Or just by using the rich foreign students
@@yucol5661how about just invest in America
"America doesn't have enough STEM students" that's BS. They treat us horribly and want to dilute the pool even more. Out of all the STEM jobs I've applied to in the last 6 years less than 10 have given me an interview and 0 hired.
America's employers are some of the most ungrateful and spoiled in the first world.
Never happen. It's too logical for academics to embrace.
OP, are u asserting that American kids don’t do STEM in college because it’s too expensive? I think the point about STEM is about kids already enrolled in college yet choosing to major in anything else BUT stem.
I grew up near Princeton, NJ, and could never believe it's a college town. My friend goes there and flat out has told me he can't go into town to do anything because even a basic lunch costs $20. Personally, I've always joked that Princeton is the only college town that has a Rolex store right across the street from the main campus gate-look it up, it's true.
I go to school in Amherst, MA (my school is actually in the stock footage from 6:07 - 6:19!) and we're much more normal in that sense, though rents here are through the roof due to overenrollment in the local colleges. UMass and Amherst College, at the very least, are thriving, and there's constant new construction and restaurants everywhere, even though we're in the middle of nowhere Western Massachusetts. It's such a striking difference.
Western Mass is an entirely different animal, in my opinion, with numerous prestigious private colleges combined with a massive public university like UMass within the region. Places like Williams, Amherst (College), Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Hampshire, etc. will not lose popularity anytime soon.
I spent a weekend in Princeton, there are some trust fund baby bidnesses, but the hotel was just $109 and there and lunch was pretty much the same price as anywhere else.
Go out onto Great Rd and you’ll see how big those houses are, then you’ll see why Princeton is the way it is
@@rook1196 Just $109! If you can afford that, a $20 lunch is nothing.
People aren’t getting married and they are not having children so this will have further impact
You're so right. There's a lot more hurt coming the way of small, obscure colleges.
Did I hear that right? 15 million pursuing a bachelorette😂
That's what I heard. I mean, it's probably true for nearly half of them. But, I do think he meant "Baccalaureate."
That’s a lot of episodes! 😂
I was a faculty member at one of the universities that merged with clarion. It was a mess and I left as soon as they announced it. But, I can attest, these towns are barren and there is nothing to do at them. Students, if they have the option in western Pennsylvania might as well go to places like Pitt, Penn State, or IUP.
They raised the drinking age from 18 to 21, and all (well most) of the bars and nightclubs catering to college students closed. That's what college student used do in these towns!!! I'm not arguing that is was the right or wrong thing to do (i don't drink myself), just pointing out why they're so barren and boring now from what we remember....
Penn State enrollment has declined the last few years. Not a problem in State College but at the satellite campuses around the state. Pennsylvania in general has an older declining population and people here are having fewer kids and if they do raise their kids here they seem to leave for other places. PA is a paradise on earth for me. I love the mountains; the scenery, the cooler weather and lack of traffic. These small towns in PA are really quite isolated for young people; not enough to do. State College is totally different. It truly has everything as well as Pittsburgh and Philly. This is definitely more of location and demographics issue than anything at least in PA
Whoever made the map you're showing apparently thinks the US has only 49 states, and one of them is called Dakota.
Canada has a funny name in French in one shot too
Tbh there shouldn’t be 2 Dakotas
@@michaelscott358 Agree just merge the Dakotas and make DC a state, then it'll still be 50 states.
They also merged West Virginia and Ohio.
College towns are disappearing because the lines have become so blurred as to what exactly a college is. A hundred years ago college was a rich kids' playground. In the mid-20th century there was an effort to democratize higher education with relatively low-priced community colleges (paperback colleges, they were called). This became so successful that trade schools got into the act by acquiring football teams and private publishing presses and rebranding themselves colleges (and charging proportionately higher tuitions), in much the same way Disneyland now calls itself a resort. Subsequently, a lot of people think they went to college, but they really didn't, a degree from Plainwrap University somehow not being held in the same regard as one from Stanford.
If its an undergrad degree, it litterally is. Theres nothing distinguishing them. Their both equally degrees.
The problem is, we exported all the normal jobs to overpopulated countries like india/china. So now everybody living in the same feudal squalor that they are.
We wouldn't need so many people going into college, if we had good paying factory jobs too.
Seriously 4 months of wages from a ford factory back then, could get you a whole car.
Cambridge doesn’t behave like a typical college town. It’s a city of over 100,000, home to a massive amount of biotech and other jobs that are fueled by Harvard and (especially) MIT’s presence and alumni base. The same can be said about the Research Triangle in North Carolina, where Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill are located. You’ll likely see more larger college towns try and follow this route to boost their economies and get more people to stay there beyond their college years.
I enjoy Cambridge way more than Boston.
Lets take the most broke and poor demographic in the US, and force them into apartments that they have no hope of living in.
What an amazing idea dude. This will surely workout.
They need to spam apartments in these college towns and fix the fucking housing crisis.
This is pure insanity. Nobody can afford shit
We have remote education, online college, as well as remote work, both are a key part of this trend.
I have lived in two college towns as a non-student, and it sucked. Both were home to major universities, and so entwined were the local governments, the schools and the economies that locals were a tertiary consideration, and had to subsume themselves to the whims of the student population.
Majority rules. What can I say?
@@kurtsalm2155 In neither were the students a majority...rather, it was money that did the talking.
Clarion has several branch campuses. It also has an extensive distance learning division; I have a graduate degree from Clarion by distance learning.
That’s precisely part of the problem! Distance ed students don’t help local communities very much b/c they aren’t physically present, “dropping” money at the local businesses and invigorating the communities.
@nondescriptnyc Not everyone is willing/able to put his/her life on hold for four years.
I read, for example, of a HS Latin teacher in Wyoming who earned a master's from a university in Ohio. Without distance learning she would have had to quit her job & move to Ohio. I, myself earned a CAS from Clarion (24 gsh post master's) online while working full time & taking care of a father with Altzheimers. Without DL this would have been IMPOSSIBLE. DL XXL blessing for those who can't put their lives on hold to improve themselves.
@@brucealanwilson4121 I think you might have missed the entire point of this news report. Nobody is talking about the value of distance education WHATSOEVER, as that is not the point of this discussion at all. This discussion is strictly about the economic and other contributions made by institutions of higher education to the local communities. I am sure, with the highly respected Clarion distance education, you are able to discern the two. Let us not conflate these two separate issues here.
One interesting aspect of the town vs gown debate is local elections. Here in Texas you can switch your registration from your home town to your college town, which means you are suddenly voting on local issues that will cease becoming your worry once you graduate. This makes things like bond issues for schools weirdly abstract to a voting student who might be gone once the bond issue hits the books, and also makes it aggravating to folks on fixed incomes who have to swallow the tax increases.
Voting doesn't matter anyway.
I went to a decently large college about an hour from Pittsburgh. The town was incredibly depressing and if you wanted to do anything other than party, then you would have to drive to the city. In fact, that is what most students did. I transferred out of the school for a plethora of reasons, but one of them was that I didn't want to live in a dying and depressing town.
Will there be a market correction for overpriced universities?
For prestige universities/colleges, no. For large state flagship unis (Michigan, PSU, UCLA etc) no.
Privates who lack a very good-excellent academic reputation will just close before they lower prices.
Places like Clarion (a no frills state teachers college) are getting market corrected by community colleges, lack of population growth and smaller and smaller state funding for tuition.
Education is expensive because unlike the factories we can't outsource it to China. But good news, we are trying!
@@rook1196 That seems like a pretty basic if not wrong explanation of education price
@@rook1196 An interesting note on the China side-They're trying to become a global education hub and are giving scholarships for foreigners who wish to study in mainland China.
When I started my undergraduate studies, I spent two years at SUNY Stony Brook. Stony Brook, Suffolk Co. is basically a college town, but I don’t think that it specifically will be threatened by the dynamics of the schools discussed in this video. It could happen at some point in the future though…
I've noticed the same undeniable trend happening in America over the last few decades - one specific thing that is causing all of this - concentration of wealth. I feel like these universities are closing because the gluttonous wasteful spending of modern academia just cannot be sustained once they've extracted all the wealth from the student body, especially now that we know that their degrees are basically worthless, or not worth enough to pay for the ungodly excessive cost to attend the place. These institutions can't exist if they lose money... same with the corporations that their students will work for and supposedly demand higher salaries from... but corporatism is ruining the world, so why would they allow some of their profits to go to employees and the institution they studied at?
Bingo. Mass wealth inequality is one the major problems that is rarely ever talked about. We can't expect a sustainable society by impoverishing so many people at the behest of a few greedy rich people. Sooner or later, the society breaks apart.
I was not expecting clarion in this video. The school’s tuition is not worth it so many people aren’t bothering to go there. When i applied it cost like 90 dollars for just the application fee. PA as a whole is so expensive for colleges, so why go to a school like Calu or Clarion when its just as expensive as a Penn state or Pitt branch campus, which offer better degrees
Small town America is dying, not just the college towns. People are moving into the cities for a reason.
As a community college student going into university in a couple of semesters I need a place that I can easily get a job due to my family’s lack of income and not some place where job opportunities lack so if I have to go to a college town it would be someplace a couple minutes away from a urban area rather than these places you listed where they are hours from job opportunities
2:05 What is a "Bachelorette" degree? Overall this content was very good - but this word used this way made me wonder if the content is AI generated & unedited?
A degree in "Girl Chasing"
AI stubs its toe again on TH-cam.
Colleges should be a cities anyway, it’s a weird American thing to have them in small rural towns.
It's kinda weird calling Fairfield AL a small college town. It's a suburb. Some of the entrances to Miles are pointed more towards Birmingham a block away than to Fairfield.
such a fascinating topic that's universal. i think of college towns as part of a bigger picture and if that bigger picture begins to crumble then everything around it does too. economically, times are tough and people want to save so they cut back which seems to include going to school. i do think politics play a role too, but probably more anecdotal because of how certain aspects like technology are shaping their environment and how they develop from that.
The big thing is that population collapse is finally hitting the colleges.
Everything cost extremely expensive. I'm one of the people reconsidering not getting marriage, having children, and attending a 4 - year university. It's insane.
I went to seek some knowledge at Southwest community college. I dropped out after a semester and a half though since I couldn't pass remedial math
A whole generation being told they had to goto college is certainly part of this drop in interest
The US map shown at 2:11 and elsewhere is fascinating. How many errors and anomalies can you find? signed, College Graduate
It's just a historic map, last time I choose a map based just on how unique I think it looks. I should have realized something was off when I saw that it had just one Dakota. As there was never a single Dakota state, North and South were admitted at the same time.
WSU should take notes from their neighbors over in Idaho. Their enrollment has gone up despite the slaughter of those 4 students that made national headlines.
Some of these, maybe a lot of these, closed colleges were not very good, even the nonprofit ones. I come from a rural state that had enough of them. Just wasted time, so many of them. Plus, man, you don’t want to live in most of those towns.
Our town has a university and a community college. But that isn't our economic base. We have a steel mill. We have two hospitals. We have 3 Walmarts.
Three Wal-Marts? WOW! Chicago can't even claim 3 Wal-Marts.
Unfortunately the liberal geniuses behind most west coast cities decided to give away all our equivalents to steel mills, to fucking india/china.
So really there aint much keeping us alive
The reality of many of these small colleges is that all they were was ‘screening’ for prospective employers to ensure they were literate. I know this because I worked along side people with degrees in psychology, drama, English Literature etc in a factory.
Now that these jobs have been outsourced, there is less employment opportunities available for them.
I HAVE AN IDEA. 9 quadrillion indians and Chinese to immigrate here, and lets send the few jobs we have, to india/china aswell.
I love dealing with the overpopulation problems of another country.
China/India arent more efficient when it comes to manufacturing. They dont produce stuff cheaper.
The only advantage they have, is the fact human life there is cheaper than a chatgpt subscription.
Its insane how we dont have overpopulation tariffs. All western countries should have tariffs that apply to the population density of a country.
Its not fair in the slightest.
My son graduated from a small, religious, rural, Southern college. That school is growing. The number of students attending goes up every year.
Sane here in Ohio. Cedarville University is busting st the seams eith a continuous wave of endowments and constructions while Urbana U diversity struggled, was bought put by Franklin University and closed. Conservatives have pushed the narrative of the uselessness of liberal arts colleges and touted faith-based colleges. Even our historic Antioch University, alma mater to Ms. Corretta Scott King and Rod Serling fell victim to declining enrollment and closed for four years. New endowments were set-up and the university opened as a smaller version of itself. Enrollment has been steadily increasing.
Bob Jones University?
@@raylopez99 No.
@@JayYoung-ro3vuvery concerning for the continued theocratization of the United States
@@aidanwotherspoon905Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Catholics are better than Antifa and BLM.
The thing about the east coast is there's a lot of random colleges and universities. Not all of them are good besides taking tuition money. Hence, don't go to a school in some backwoods town or live in a nothing special town.
WSU is interesting because it's a small rural wheat farming town with a major state university, literally in the middle of nowhere, about a 1 1/2 hours drive to any major population center. The town is an anomaly that shouldn't even exist.
I did not expect this to start with Clarion lol, I went there for 2 semesters!
Good. An entire generation+ of 18-year-olds was fed the lie that a 4-year college degree (or even a master’s!) was essential for survival and thus worth as much as the mortgage on a house. It was never either of these things. It is useful if you are truly determined to work and talented in the fields of medicine, lawyering, or education, but there are also plenty of degrees you can get much quicker and cheaper that will give you a foothold in these areas, and many others, to boot! 👍
Not sure I want to be within a mile of anything engineered by someone without an engineering degree.
Massachusetts with free college: 👀
Is that umich in your thumbnail?
From a parent's point of view the colleges are 1) getting too expensive, 2) graduating students who haven't learned a marketable skill (i.e. useless degrees), and 3) becoming institutions of indoctrination rather than learning. This is something parents are choosing not to fund.
science and technology innovation already takes place in the secular and civilized world now, far away from the failing occidental countries. US population needs to drop a little more and can be turned into nature reserve, don't expect much more from them as they fade away
What is that map at 2:12?
there is absolutely, positively, no freakin way that the average college spends 11,000 dollars per student a year, thats an absurdly high number that surely has a lot of "Hollywood accounting" factored in. At the very least it's massively skewed towards the amounts those same "noisy few" mentioned at the start of the video spend. And it's not like it's even per student, it's just the average being misleading in multiple statistics leading to a massive compounding of misleading. A school with a sports team spends countless millions on it's sports programs when only a small fraction of it's student body actually uses the money it's spending on those athletes and then you take those schools skewed average per student and it further skews the average spent across all colleges.
If you were to look at the average that small schools without Ivy League prestige or massive sports programs spends per student I wouldn't be surprised if it's as much as 75% less than that 11,000 number.
Ha!! I was just joking with someone a few days ago about Athens, WV being a "college town". Nobody anywhere I go knows about Concord. It's a great school. Athens the "college town" had a grand total of 1 stoplight and 1 pharmacy and a few churches and that was it. There was a gas station but it was technically just outside city limits. I get excited when someone knows about it. I was there from 2002-2007
5:50 investlement
Lol the map also merges 2 other states that should really be just one. New Hampshire and Vermont (actually all those should be New England with Ct, Ma, Me and Ri). Wyoming should be with Co. and DC is just a city in Maryland!
as a vermonter I gotta say I don't wanna merge with any of them
Why don't they take in more international students when enrollment of American students is shrinking? International students pay all of their tuition themselves and if they could stay in America after the end of their education they will be skilled and highly skilled immigrants.
They take as many internationals who can afford it as they possibly can. If your parents can pay 70k dollars a year then you have to be an idiot to not get accepted. I worked in admissions at a major USA university.
I’ll assume it’s because international students often do not 1. Want to go to the school or 2. Do not know of the schools existence.
Many of the bigger schools are doing that. The U of Washington was already doing that back when I went in the late 1980s early 1990s. I am not sure how supportive these small schools could be for those types of students due to the lack of infrastructure and even cultural differences in some places.
@@literatinyc Dear friend, This is not true because talented international students all know American schools very well and all wish to study there
The problem is in the immigration system of USA which does not allow them to easily enter USA and study and stay there after they finish their education so educated, legal and qualified immigrants and students cant enter and stay in USA but millions of illegal ones can do!
@@killbaal4149 Dear friend, there are millions of talented students all around the world that wish to study in American schools, universities and higher education systems and even in small schools but the immigration and visa laws and policies does not allow them to do that.
Cultural differences are not important because most of the people of the world and particularly the educated, smart and talented people admire the American culture and can easily get assimilated into it.
What is a college “bachelorette?” Is this intentionally bad for views? Engagement? Here I am commenting, so I guess I fell for it
So what's the solution?
what is the difference between a restaurant and an eatery?
the tip. 😉
@@reddykilowattLol!
The world is becoming more urbanized, making small towns obsolete for the most part. Towns should be incentivizing people to live there, but instead greed rules the day so the towns rot away while the local townspeople wonder what happened.
Seems like a lot of colleges are just online now, definitely noticed this
Same as Law Schools.
Better to enter Trades like elevator mechanic, aviation mechanics or respiratory therapist
Clarion is possibly the worst public college in PA. Can't imagine Penn West is much better.
This narrator dude needs an education. "...with about 8 million pursuing a 'bachelorette'"? Try making that a four year bachelor's degree. Obviously he didn't earn such a degree and spent way too much time spent watching 'reality' TV.
The politically correct version of Chasing Girls!
Let's build some cool new, walkable towns - with our own economies.
20 grand ?
No way
was this entire video made by ai? 😂
Pursuing Bachelorettes!
This is sad. It would be great if someone could explain "why", because I know it's complicated.In California, UCs and state schools used to be free. Republicans changed that, I'm not sure why.
Clarion is a generic college offering a generic degree. They couldn’t compete with underwater basket weaving at “bigger generic college.” These universities did this to themselves. Figure it out 🍻
MILES COLLEGE MENTIONED
Cause no one wants to live in the middle of nowhere
Carbondale IL
My son graduated from a small, religious college in a rural area of the South. That school is growing quite nicely.
Much of the problem is that the "small, liberal arts college" is an outdated model. Parents don't want to take out exorbitant loans to send their kids to party for 4 (or 5) years, live in "co-ed" dorms in which immorality is rampant, study more high school level content, receive political indoctrination, and then only be eligible for employment at at pay level they could have gotten with just high school. Offering more workforce focused degrees, at better prices, and limiting the self-destructive student behavior & political indoctrination *could* bring back some of these schools. Universities forgot that the *parents* are their real customers - if parents aren't on-board, students in their late teens aren't likely to be able to attend these schools.
Very well stated. Bravo!
Simple solution: transfer to one of the Ivy League schools. Education is largely signaling rather than substantive so this is a win if you can pull it off.
Or a college that plays major college sports like a Big Ten or SEC school.
No point in going, it's so overpriced and you're not guaranteed a good job anymore. I dropped out after a semester, and I have a better job than probably every "gender studies" graduated ever 😂😂😂.
uconn storrs grrr
"YOUNG SKULLS FILLED WITH USELESS COLLEGIATE MUSH " --Rush Limbaugh
most these people are falling because other businesses that some people get angry or jellies and many more
Tradies rise up
i think the better question is how colleges have failed americans
Not me I make more money than you
@@traviswilson36 i guarantee you dont
just Trump University 😂
@@reddykilowatt lmao no one even mentioned him, im not a supporter but TDS is a real thing.
@@nathanboyles6222 notice as colleges go down, prisons go up. lucky for DJT since he will have more to choose from. 😂
This situation is where the survival of the fittest meets supply and demand. It's all that simple at it's core. One rule for selecting a college: Don't go to a college where nobody outside of a 100-mile radius has even heard of the college. The ROI (return on investment) will be negligible to non-existent.