Promotional Information

Fascinating and ambitious. There will be a wide and eager audience for this book. -- Martin J. Finkelstein, Seton Hall University, coauthor of The Faculty Factor: Reassessing the American Academy in a Turbulent Era An ambitious, original book that provides a new and much-needed general framework for detailed, fact-based forecasting of the demand for higher education over the next 15-20 years. Grawe's scholarship is well beyond sound. -- Bradley G. Lewis, Union College

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Demographic Headwinds for Higher Education
2. Demographics as Destiny?
3. The Higher Education Demand Index
4. Changing Contours of Population and Aggregate Higher Education Demand
5. Demand for Two-Year Programs
6. Demand for Four-Year Institutions
7. Is Anyone Paying for All of This?
8. Coping with Change
9. Anticipated Higher Education Attendance
10. The Potential for Policy to Affect Attendance Rates
11. Looking beyond 2030
Methodological Appendix
Notes
References
Index

About the Author

Nathan D. Grawe is the Ada M. Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Social Sciences at Carleton College, where he served as associate dean from 2009 to 2012.

Reviews

Over the past two weeks I've read a book about the future of American higher ed, and want to recommend it very highly. It might be the most important book on the subject published this year.
—Bryan Alexander blog

This “birth dearth” has prompted Nathan Grawe, Professor of Economics at Carleton College, to analyze the dynamics of demographic shifts and consider how schools might prepare for a significant decrease in demand. Grawe meticulously presents his findings in his insightful and practical new book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education.
—Degree or Not Degree

Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, by Nathan Grawe, is both terrifying and worth reading if you work in, or care about, higher education. I actually gasped several times, which isn't my usual response to monographs about demographics.
—Inside Higher Ed

Grawe's book is timely, well-researched, and thought-provoking. Especially college or university presidents would be well-served to give it a thorough reading, and this reviewer certainly be sharing the book with his.
—Michael T. Catalano, Dakota Wesleyan University, Numeracy

The leading spokesperson of this emergent discourse of demographic crisis is the economist Nathan D. Grawe, whose book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education sent a shockwave through higher education's administrative class. 
—Los Angeles Review of Books

The most influential academic book of the past few years.
—Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Education