By Jim Teece

I was sitting in an auditorium at Arizona State University last week, inside the magnificent Mirabella at ASU, a Pacific Retirement project in partnership with ASU, surrounded by hundreds of people and I was one of the youngest in the room.

What I thought was going to be a presentation on the facility became something that shocked me and inspired me at the same time. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it and I find myself looking for ways to address this weird confluence head on. 

This was the first time I heard of something called the “Enrollment Cliff” where ALL universities will have 15% less enrollment because of less students entering the school starting in 2025. 

This was also the first time I heard that in 2030 there will be more people in the US > 65 than < 19. This is the first time in our nation’s history that this will occur. 

Let that soak in. 

All universities will have 15% less students to entice to attend their institution and there will be more retirees than students under the age of 19.

At the same time. 

A number of years ago, I was president of the Ashland Chamber of Commerce and it was at a time that I was helping with a school bond as well. (I also ran for school board and lost by the widest margin in history but that is another story.) 

Ashland was shutting down elementary schools. We just didn’t have enough children to keep 5 schools open.

Ashland was nationally recognized as a great place to age in some national Retirement Magazine. The Silver Tsunami was upon us.

I remember being laughed at during the Chamber annual dinner when I told everyone to drink up, dance, loosen up and go home and make babies. Yeah, it was an awkward kind of laugh. But I was almost serious.

Without babies our community would change. The educators would leave. The school district would change. As you can imagine, no one took me seriously and now we are living that reality.

15% less students at SOU equates to around 1,000 students. Wow! 

How will universities survive this cliff? What about School Districts? 

Would your business survive if it lost 15% of its customers? Many would not. 

The more I learned about this the more I relaxed. Universities are filled with really smart people. They have been aware and working on this for many years. They are finding international students to fill the gap. They are redefining what a student is and what a college education is with certifications along with diplomas. 

Now, let’s think about the other side of this. The Boomers will outnumber the number of children. 

Instead of building schools we will be building assisted living facilities. 

It will be interesting to watch over the next 5 years and the impact over the next 20 years after that.

Ageism is alive and well in society today. We have spent the last decade or two worrying about millennials and GenZ. Worrying about how to talk, walk and act young because we were becoming less relevant in the workplace. 

But now look. There will be more of us than them. 

The whacky commercials with crazy themes will mean less to us. They already mean less to us.

We will stay in the workforce longer. 

We will create businesses in our 70’s. 

We will regain our dignity and take away blindly swiping right and sometimes up or down just because, without visual aids or intuition. 

Everything is going to change… again, but maybe it will change back. 

Back to basics. Back to simple. Back to core. Back to work. 

How does this impact you and your business over the next 5 years? Let me know. I can’t stop thinking about it. 

Read more about the confluence at https://southernoregonbusiness.com/the-enrollment-cliff-and-the-boomer-generation-a-confluence-of-demographic-shifts/.

Also, while I was in Arizona getting my mind blown, my son sent this photo of a fire that started in Ashland. This was taken from his home. The crews put the fire out right away because we fight fires in Jackson County but it wasn’t lost on me that it was on the eve of the Almeda Fire anniversary that claimed over 2,500 homes and businesses just 4 years earlier. We had a mild Smoke Season this summer, but fire is definitely top of mind in Southern Oregon. This fire caused a lot of evacuations and triggered stress. Luckily the fire was put out before it spread. The weather was not the same as it was 4 years ago. Big shout out to all the firefighters and my son, who jumped in his truck and rushed to help evacuate animals from ranches in the path of the fire, right after he took this photo.