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- Hacker News
- Why go into debt when most knowledge worker's lifetime productivity will likely be replicable by a few dollars of compute. TFW out competed by sand.by maxglute
- Good. These institutions are being recognized for the very little they actually are. Market repricing to near $0 in progress.by 4d4m
- by fortran77
- We are already seeing it in the California State University system. Many of the universities have plummeting student enrollment. I suspect Sonoma State will be the first to be closed. More will follow them. Our local school districts have lost more than 40% of their students from the high water mark in the early 2000’s.by vondur
- https://college-cuts.com/ is resource for tracking these closures across the US.
Pace of college closings picks up, with more projected - https://hechingerreport.org/pace-of-college-closings-picks-u... - August 3rd, 2026
More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows - https://hechingerreport.org/more-than-a-quarter-of-private-c... - April 13th, 2026
> A new estimate projects that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, with a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years.
> Nearly a third of private, nonprofit colleges and universities nationwide posted deficits in 2024, according to research by Robert Kelchen, director of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. More than a third of 44 comparatively small colleges in New England analyzed separately by education consultant Steven Shulman are running out of operating money, Shulman found.
The US simply has too much excess K-12 and college education capacity for too few students forwarding looking, with the caveat being there will be voracious demand for tradespeople, healthcare workers, and similar combined "physical and skill knowledge work" forward looking.
HN Search: labor shortage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by toomuchtodo - Based on a preponderance of the evidence, I don't believe this is a problem considering the issue of "elite overproduction." The US is arguably already producing too many college graduates, and those students are incurring substantial debt for unnecessary credentials. ~4 million students graduate from U.S. postsecondary/postgraduate programs each year, as of this comment, half of which don't require or otherwise cannot use those credentials for employment.
Talent Disrupted (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49279800 - August 2026
> A 2024 report by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Institute for the Future of Work found that, a year after graduation, about half of US college grads were in jobs that “do not require a degree or make meaningful use of college-level skills.”
Report: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6777c52f82e5471a3732ea25/...
College Grads Struggle to Find Jobs. Non-Grads Are Giving Up - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-08-12/colleg... | https://archive.today/ccseC - August 12th, 2026
The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis (2025) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015504 - May 2026
Half of College Graduates Are Working High School Level Jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39512160 - February 2024
by toomuchtodo - Ok, but then there's a nasty question: why do employers not choose to create high-value jobs doing high-value work? Wouldn't this indicate an economy with stagnant or declining productivity-per-hour?by eli_gottlieb
- In a properly run society higher education would be very cheap and its utility would not be measured solely on whether or not degrees are directly used in employment.by czgov