SCUPer and renowned higher education thought leader George Keller is no longer with us. However, his vision and intellect are visible in some of the papers he shared with us in higher education literature before he died.

In 2001, at SCUP–46, George presented, to a standing room only crowd, "The New Demographics in Higher Education." That content was published in an article of the same name in The Review of Higher Education. 

You may be able to access the full article at Project Muse. (If your campus or company provides access. Still within "fair use," we have quoted more extensively here than usual for those of you who cannot access it.) It is worth a careful read in the context of how much has changed in only ten years:

Population:

For U.S. colleges and universities, the sudden turn in world fertility rates means that they may see a new mix of the nearly 500,000 students who enroll annually from abroad and may need to pay greater attention to the Muslim and African worlds. They will also need to reassess their programs of study abroad. The smaller number of young people in the United States and other developed nations will require these countries to help their no-longer expanding workforce become more productive. This development should further improve the position of women in both higher education and the economy, and it will press governments to enlarge the skills, education, and opportunities for their minority and immigrant--and perhaps their older--citizens. Higher education and job training--and retraining--will be more important to insure that the entire labor force is capable of productive work. Retraining has already become a prominent feature at many of America's community colleges.

Aging:

What is less known is that American's elderly are the new rich--the healthiest, wealthiest old people in history. MIT management professor Lester Thurow (1996) argues that they are "a new class of people"--the "woopies" (well-off older people). have a median per capita income 67% above that of the population as a whole. As recently as 1970, they were the poorest group in U.S. society; but today their poverty rate is lower and median household wealth is greater than that of any other age group in the country. Increasingly, portions of the tuition of numerous college students are being paid for by grandparents. Many universities have made deferred giving for the elderly a major new emphasis in their fund-raising efforts and have begun importuning their older alumni and friends to remember the institution in their wills and trusts.

Immigration/International:

But numerous critics urge colleges to become even more aggressive in recruiting immigrant youths and more receptive to them so that the future leadership in the United States will be close to representative of society's new ethnic distribution (Aguirre & Martinez, 1993). This is comparatively easy to do for many Asian youths because of their often superior school records, but is harder to do for the children of Mexican immigrants because Mexican-American students have the highest noncompletion rate (almost 50%) from high school of all ethnic groups. Yet the need for more education among young Mexican-Americans is urgent because Mexican-American women have the highest birth rate of any ethnic group, according to a 1998 National Center for Health Statistics report, and because the birth [End Page 225] rate for Hispanic teenagers now exceeds that of Black teenagers. Though Latinos may soon become America's largest minority group--36 to 38 million--in 1996 they earned only 4% of the college degrees awarded.

Family Life:

But whatever the reasons, the reformation of traditional family life is having profound effects on society, children and the schools, and on institutions of higher education. The most visible and tragic is the startling new poverty of the young. According to the 1998 study by the National Center for Children in Poverty, about 38% of the nation's poor today are children. They have replaced the elderly as the largest group in poverty. The center's director says, "The United States continues to have the highest rate of young-child poverty of any Western industrialized nation" (qtd. in Lewin, 1998, p. A19). The major cause is the increase in children living with unmarried mothers; such children are five times as likely to be poor as those living with married parents. More than 60% of the households in the bottom quintile of family incomes are headed by women.

Diversity Statistics:

Most colleges and universities still keep diversity statistics for reporting purposes by the four OMB "racial" categories, and many institutions have affirmative action goals by "race." But the new ethnic and religious intermarriages are beginning to produce undergraduates who do not fit into any category neatly. For some institutions the idea of affirmative action in its present form will increasingly be viewed as outmoded, although there is still considerable support on most campuses for special treatment for nonimmigrant African Americans, most of whom cruelly suffered until a century ago from slavery and until recently from widespread discrimination (Patterson, 1997). The growing creolization of the students, staff, and faculty in U.S. higher education is also likely to diminish the current high degree of attention to color, ethnic, and religious classifications.

The Bottom Line:

The changing demographics of the U.S. population (and of other nations) has quietly but profoundly begun to pull higher education in different directions and to cause the introduction of new academic programs, practices, and personnel policies. The efforts are likely to continue. Higher education's leaders and scholars would be prudent to understand the underlying demographic shifts shaping their future.