The Denver Post reports that Colorado colleges and universities are bracing for a demographic enrollment cliff, driven by the simple fact that Americans started having fewer babies about 18 years ago. Nationally, high school graduates peaked in 2025 at nearly 3.9 million and are expected to decline through 2041. Colorado is projected to see a 12% drop in high school graduates between 2023 and 2041.
That is the article. Here is the bigger problem: demographics are a stubborn kind of math, and math does not care about your mission statement. Colleges are now discovering what churches, employers, small towns, and school districts should have noticed a long time ago. When people stop having babies, eventually you run out of students, workers, taxpayers, soldiers, teachers, nurses, and neighbors.
This gives me an excuse to say one of my favorite cringy mantras: have babies. Lots and lots of babies.
The Bullet Point Brief
- The Denver Post says U.S. births declined 16% between 2007 and 2025, while Colorado births dropped about 8% in the same period. That is not a trend line. That is a warning light on the dashboard, and the engine is starting to make expensive noises.
- Higher education is feeling it first because 18 years after fewer babies are born, fewer freshmen show up with backpacks and meal plans. Amazing how time works. Someone alert the strategic planning office.
- Colleges are trying to adapt by recruiting nontraditional students, reducing barriers, pushing direct admissions, offering affordability promises, and chasing students who were once overlooked. Good. But that is triage, not a cure.
- The article notes that critical jobs requiring degrees, including nurses and teachers, depend on a healthy workforce pipeline. Translation: this is not just a college budget problem. It is a civilization problem wearing a campus hoodie.
- Colorado Mesa University President John Marshall says too many schools are fishing in a shrinking pond instead of getting serious about students who have not traditionally gone to college. That is right. But even the best fishing strategy does not fix an empty lake.
My Bottom Line
God commanded us to be fruitful and multiply. For a generation or two, too much of the culture has treated that command like junk mail. We scared young people with apocalypse politics. We made family formation expensive. We turned children into a lifestyle accessory, then acted shocked when young adults chose the dog, the microbrewery, and the one-bedroom lease they can barely afford.
We abort babies and call it choice. We prevent conception and call it science. We bury young families under housing costs, student loans, taxes, insurance, childcare expenses, and economic uncertainty, then wonder why they are starting later and having fewer children. At some point, even a society with a Ph.D. in denial has to admit the obvious: if you do not replace yourself, you decline.
Government incentivizes what it wants more of and taxes what it wants less of. Right now, we make family life harder than it needs to be, then hold conferences about workforce shortages. Spare me. If we want a future, we should be incentivizing the hell out of families who want children. Not with another slogan campaign, but with real policy that makes it easier for young people to marry, buy homes, afford childcare, and raise kids without needing a trust fund or three side hustles.
Colleges can hustle for students. They should. They can recruit better, serve working adults, welcome first-generation students, and make degrees more affordable. Good. But the deeper answer is not buried in an enrollment spreadsheet. It is in the nursery. A country that forgets babies eventually gets reminded by empty classrooms, closed programs, shrinking towns, and a workforce that cannot carry the load. Have babies. Lots and lots of babies.
Source: The Denver Post
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