Some College Towns Are Losing Their Lifeline

For decades, being a "college town" has been a surefire bet against economic downturn. But a new Wall Street Journal analysis finds that things are changing:

• "Among metropolitan areas especially reliant on higher education, three-quarters of them suffered weaker economic growth between 2011 and 2023 than the U.S. as a whole," reads the story by Konrad Putzier, Douglas Belkin, and Anthony DeBarros. The stat is from Brookings Metro, a nonprofit think tank in DC.
• The trend is nuanced: Generally speaking, cities where large flagship universities are located are doing fine. But places with lesser-known schools are struggling. The story, for example, focuses on Macomb, Illinois, which is near Western Illinois University.

• One big factor is that college enrollment has been shrinking as more high school graduates are turned off by the prospect of student debt. And those who do opt for college are gravitating toward bigger schools. What's more, starting next spring, the number of high school grads in the US is expected to decline annually for the foreseeable future.
• Other factors include Trump administration polices that threaten schools' public funding and their ability to bring in international students on temporary visas.
• "It's just been one financial crisis after another for the past 15 or 17 years," Andrew Koricich of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges tells the Journal. "It starts to accumulate in smaller college towns, especially for colleges that don't have billions of dollars in the bank."

(Read the full story.)