Photo by Zhanhui Li on Unsplash

My town has always had a good track record of getting its smartest students into the Ivy League colleges, but parents tell me that those kids aren’t getting into the most elite college anymore. Now, those kids are still doing really well. Maybe they are going to Dartmouth or University of Michigan instead of Princeton. And the students who used to go to Dartmouth or University of Michigan are now going to still really great colleges, just one or two rungs down on the ranking ladder. 

While the competition is heating up among the private colleges and flagship colleges — 72 of those schools have acceptance rates of less than 20 percent — other colleges are struggling to get warm bodies in the door. 1 in 5 students at community collegesaren’t even 18. They’re high school students looking for trade classes or advanced classes to prepare them for college. 

A few years back, I wrote an article for The Atlantic about Sweet Briar College, a small, private college on the edge of bankruptcy. Since then things have gotten worse for those small colleges and community colleges, because they don’t have enough students to pay the tuition, while dealing with rising costs and dwindling donations. In the coming years, higher education is going to be marked by intensity at the top and closed doors at the bottom.

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