College frenzy likely to ease as fewer graduate high school

[flashl]

High-school seniors across America are anxiously awaiting the verdicts from the colleges of their choice later this month. But though it may not be of much solace to them, in just a few years the admissions frenzy is likely to ease. It's simply a matter of demographics.

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high-school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students likely finding it easier to get into college.

...

That won't help Charlie Cotton, a senior at Madison High School in New Jersey. He has the grades and scores to aim for the nation's elite universities; yet, in the hypercompetitive world of college admissions, his chances of winning a spot at his top picks — such as Middlebury, Dartmouth and Oberlin — are highly uncertain. When his sister, Emma, who is in eighth grade, applies to college, she is expected to face a less frantic landscape with fewer rivals.

The demographic changes include sharp geographic, social and economic variations. Experts anticipate, for example, a decline in affluent high-school graduates and an increase in poor and working-class ones. In response, colleges and universities are already increasing their recruitment of students in high-growth states and expanding their financial-aid offerings to low-income students with academic potential.

Seattle Times

This too shall pass after the economic meltdown.

[Warpy]

1. It'll end because the JOBS just aren't there

and that situation is going to become worse as the economic meltdown continues.

[2Design]

2. read how colleges are getting lots of foreign apps because our

dollar is in the dumper and it makes it affordable and then when they graduated they will get people like Bill Gates to hire them