Justin Fox, Columnist

Fewer Kids Are Choosing College

A strong job market is luring high school graduates away from campus. Here’s why that could be a problem.

May 14, 2019 at 2:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

The path isn’t always clear.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

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In the spring semester of 2011, there were 5,560 students enrolled at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, Indiana. Now it’s just 3,556 — a 36% drop.

Some of this decline can be explained by demographics. Five percent fewer people graduated from high school in the Midwest in 2017-2018 than in 2009-2010, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, and in and around shrinking, aging Gary — an industrial city that’s part of the Chicago metropolitan area — the downtrend may be even steeper.