Imagine a world where the United States’ overall population remained where it is today, but the number of young people decreased. More people in retirement homes; fewer in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges. What would this mean for a country hell-bent on growth above all else? What would this mean for higher education?
This is what is happening right now as population growth in the United States is decreasing or stagnant and immigration is lower than it has been in the past. The situation we find ourselves in has been predicted by demographers for decades. Folks in higher education call this the Enrollment Cliff.
What is the Enrollment Cliff?
Basically, the Enrollment Cliff is the decrease in college enrollments higher education caused by a demographic decrease in college-aged Americans. It’s covered in this series on the CUPA HR website: (https://www.cupahr.org/issue/feature/higher-ed-enrollment-cliff/). We’ve covered some aspects of the Enrollment Cliff’s impact on archaeology in Episode 223 of the CRM Archaeology Podcast, but I have much more to say about it in this blog post. (https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/crmarchpodcast/223).
If you do cultural resource management archaeology in the United States, you should be concerned about this shortfall in college enrollments because it will dramatically transform CRM. This could also be the end of archaeology consulting if we’re not careful….
Did the pandemic accelerate the Enrollment Cliff?
Yes. These decreases were predicted years ago; however, the pandemic and other reasons has rapidly accelerated the number of students “opting out” of college:
The 5% drop in undergraduates in 2021 was joined by additional decreases in 2022. These enrollment drops will ripple throughout society for several years because there will be fewer college students filtering up into sophomore—senior years. This also has a chance to impact graduate programs even though grad school enrollment actually increased over the pandemic years because it is unlikely these increasingly smaller cohorts of undergraduates will choose to apply to majors where the connection between gainful employment and a graduate degree is less clear (Ahem, fields like anthropology). It will also cause major impacts for these less wealthy programs because these lower enrollments mean less tuition dollars to support college majors that do not typically bring in large alumni donations (Aaaahem, Anthropology).
The way higher ed has dealt with this in the past has been through growth but, demographically, there are fewer college-aged Americans available to replace those who didn’t enroll in recent years. Worldwide, population growth is slowing which suggests other countries may also experience Enrollment Cliffs of their own. It also means American universities will not be able to rely on international students to cover the tuition spread.
Recent enrollment decreases in the United States were even steeper for BIPOC students. College in the United States is expensive. Prohibitively expensive for millions of Americans. An increasing number of Americans are deciding to opt out of college, taking jobs now in hopes that they can go back to school later. Or make a living without a degree altogether.
Constantly in need of financial resources, students of color are increasingly likely to forgo college. BIPOC students are less likely to have a safety net within their family upon which they could rely and more likely to need gainful employment as soon as possible. Many students of color live in families that need financial support from their college-aged members, so BIPOC students have even more reasons to take the best job they can get right now and worry about tomorrow when it comes.
African American enrollment fell from 2.5 million students to 1.9 million from 2010 to 2020 (https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-happened-to-black-enrollment). The pandemic worsened these declines as thousands of Black students took jobs to make it through the quarantine thinking they can go to college later. But going back to school is more difficult as you get older and have more obligations. We will have to see what happens to African American students in the near future, especially as these students who deferred college will start hitting the glass ceiling caused by job position requirements that call for a college degree exactly at the time when their children will need them in the workforce.
Your first years out of college are so important for lifetime career earnings and your ability to take advantage of Job Hopping, which is the primary method Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Zers to improve their careers. Those with a college degree, skills, and experience will have fewer problems finding gainful employment and moving up corporate ladders than those who do not. The sooner you start, the quicker and more prolonged your climb will be throughout your career. This is another reason why it’s particularly disturbing to see that so many potential students forgo a college degree that will increase their odds of a decent economic status later in life.
It’s not just Demographics and Pandemics
Americans are questioning the value of a college degree in general, especially its cost. The number one reason why students are passing on a college degree is it doesn’t always make financial sense until much later in life.
Part of the high cost of higher education is the universities’ own fault; however, they have not enjoyed adequate state funding for over a generation so it makes sense that universities would have to make up budgetary shortfalls somehow. Gigabytes have been written exploring the reasons why universities in the United States cost so much but, at the end of the day, it’s because our government does not adequately fund them. We always have $ for the military but must beg millionaires to launder money through our universities and rely on semi-professional sports powered by unpaid young lives to cover the bills on campus. Universities are overbuilding to attract more students because tuition is an increasingly important source of revenue. It’s a positive feedback loop that has made college too expensive for working class Americans.
(FYI: If you work for a living, you’re working class. If you don’t have to work and live off of the labor of others, you’re upper class or elite. There is no middle class in the United States.)
Universities are relying on students being able to take out obscene amounts of money in student loans to pay higher tuition. I mean what could be wrong with letting 18 through 22-year-olds take out $100,000+ in loans that can’t be wiped away with bankruptcy so they can get a college degree? Why would we need to counsel them about debts and income BEFORE they go to college? What could go wrong? A growing number of Americans are starting to question whether the loans they took out are worth the careers their degrees provided given they’re still paying them back decades after graduation.
Another reason why students are opting out of college is because, for the time being, employers are realizing that they don’t need college graduates for a number of positions in their companies. Some employers are finding that they can hire straight out of high school, provide very limited training, and get the kind of student universities are not producing: a cheap, expendable, undervalued worker.
As Temple University’s president Jason Wingard wrote in an opinion article in Inside Higher Ed, universities need to address the elephant in the room if they are to remain relevant in the future: They are expensive and don’t prepare students for the workplace. Upon realizing employers were no longer hiring Temple graduates as gregariously, Wingard explains,
“When I probed them as to why they were hiring students straight from high school, I was told that “the college degree had ceased to be a guarantee that employers were going to get what they wanted.” So instead, why not go younger? Why not hire cheaper?”
He continues that, to remain relevant, universities need to reevaluate their curriculum as to make sure their teaching is in sync with the needs of industry:
“The key to retaining the value of a degree from your own institution is ensuring your graduates have the skills to change with any market. This means that we must tweak and adapt our curriculum at least every single year.”
Anthropology departments are not reviewing their curriculum each year. They are proceeding as if nothing is happening even though much is. And anthropology enrollments are going down.
I’ve been talking about this for years
The Succinct Research Blog was created in 2013 specifically because I’d long known that universities were not preparing anthropology students for careers in archaeology. Most of what I learned in college didn’t help me and I don’t see where most programs have changed much since I started college in 1997:
http://www.succinctresearch.com/which-college-courses-helped-my-archaeology-career/
http://www.succinctresearch.com/archaeology-field-techs-teach-phds-archaeology/
I’ve also discussed some of the things university students need to do to start a career in CRM archaeology. Most of this goes unaddressed in university anthropology programs:
http://www.succinctresearch.com/what-undergraduate-archaeology-students-expect-in-college/
The blog has hundreds of posts. You can see my perspective if you skim it for just a few minutes. I’ve done what I can to channel my frustrations with academia into the way I teach students in my current position as an assistant professor. Nevertheless, I am part of a very small minority of anthropology professors that puts preparing students for the workplace over their own personal research interests. This is why students learn very little in college, why anthropology enrollments are decreasing, and why archaeology’s future is in jeopardy.
While undergraduate enrollments are down in aggregate, there are some universities that will be disproportionately affected. Larger state universities and prestigious schools will not feel the burn. In fact, top schools are seeing undergraduate enrollments increase while smaller liberal arts colleges are going bankrupt. Also, certain disciplines will see enrollment increases at the expense of others. For example, most of the top paying careers are in engineering. So, it makes sense that engineering departments may not be seeing the same enrollment decreases unless they are at smaller colleges. Anthropology is not commonly associated with high paying careers after graduation, so it is likely this is partially behind the lower enrollment anthropology departments are seeing.
What are anthropology departments doing to address this?
I’ve only been an assistant professor for five years so take my observations with a grain of salt. But I’ve been doing archaeology for more than 20 years and spent 11 years in college. I’ve seen a lot of changes in American archaeology, but I haven’t seen academic departments doing very much to address the problems they are facing.
Anthropology departments were noting the decline in undergrad enrollments back in the early 2000s. Universities have struggled to increase enrollments after the Great Recession and the Enrollment Cliff was predicted decades ago. Most anthropology departments have still done next to nothing that I can see to substantially address these problems.
There are several reasons behind this, but the two main reasons I’ve noticed is; 1) the ossification of anthropology curriculum and 2) professors who are unwilling to acknowledge they are part of the problem. I’ll wager this is why anthropology departments are not adapting to the demographic realities higher education is facing.
Anthropology departments may see the train wreck unfolding but they find their faculty are so stuck in their ways that curriculum reform is impossible. Without demonstrating that anthropology undergrads go on to gainful employment after graduation, departments will continue finding it difficult to recruit new students. These departments will struggle to help their students realize gainful employment if they don’t teach workplace skills. Anthropology departments can forget about attracting BIPOC students unless they can show the time and money invested in these programs is going to realize financial gain.
I’ve noticed there’s a horrible feedback loop in American anthropology departments:
1) Anthropology departments don’t teach workplace skills. Archaeology professors just drone on about theory and the one archaeological site they’ve ever dug. They rarely teach anything students can use to land gainful employment. ==>
2) Students find trouble landing gainful employment after graduation because their professors never taught them anything that could be valued in the workplace. ==>
3) Potential students are dissuaded from becoming anthropology majors because previous graduates can’t use their anthropology degree to get work. They spread the word that anthropology is useless. ==>
4) The department sees enrollment decreases. ==>
5) Professors realize their department is going down and but don’t start teaching things that help students get jobs. They don’t know how to tap into the population of underserved low income, BIPOC, and non-traditional students. They don’t know how to get students who have dropped out to come back to college (HINT: You’ll get these students once you demonstrate your degree is worth their time and money). ==>
6) Anthropology professors are unwilling to change curriculum to help future students because that would mean doing something other than serving on committees, going to conferences, doing fieldwork, and talking about themselves. Professors would have to learn something useful that they could teach to students but that’s hard work, would require creativity, and would force them to talk to their “unfortunate” colleagues who work in CRM. So, enrollments continue to decline as professors continue to teach useless material. ==>
7) The cycle continues. Fewer students means the department will receive less money from the university. It also means less underpaid graduate student servitude. This means there are fewer tenure track faculty to teach classes, which leads to fewer options for the existing anthropology students or adjunctification (e.g. an increasing number of courses taught by adjunct faculty who enjoy few of the benefits tenure track professors have). Not only are students not learning workplace skills, but they also struggle to complete the required courses because they can’t get into the classes they need. Or the classes are taught by overworked grad students who know even less about archaeology. Some students change majors. Some grind through the program. All students tell others how dysfunctional their department is, further decreasing the chance of increasing enrollment. ==>
8) All of this continues until the university dissolves the anthropology department.
Academicians get angry when universities dissolve anthropology departments even though the department wasn’t upholding the social charter behind the concept of “higher education.” Is it higher ed if students aren’t learning anything they couldn’t learn by reading your articles? Are you serving your students if you don’t teach workplace skills? I mean, they’re not spending tens of thousands of dollars and years of their youth for personal fulfillment with no expectation of a return on investment. They expect to learn the kind of things that will help them get jobs. Archaeology jobs.
When a department is dissolved or combined with other weak departments, professors lament the fact that universities don’t care about liberal arts and social sciences even though students didn’t want to learn from that department anyway (e.g. professors didn’t teach students anything useful) otherwise enrollments would have been strong or increased. The department hadn’t demonstrated its usefulness to the university (e.g. reeled in a bunch of money from alumni who landed good jobs, brought in money for research, or increased the number of undergrad enrollments). Nor, had it demonstrated its value to students. Is it wrong to dissolve a department like this?
Despite these realities, anthropology departments don’t change their curriculum. They won’t do it. Nor, do they start teaching the valuable workplace skills students and the CRM industry crave. The cycle continues at another university… CRM companies still have to teach university graduates how to do archaeology. Decades roll on…
(FYI: Anthropology departments won’t know what useful workplace skills are unless they talk with people who are in the workplace. If they stay siloed in the Ivory Tower, their department will remain susceptible to dissolution and see student enrollment attrition. Professors, y’all need to get out there and ask employers what they need from graduates. You need to meekly realize you don’t know what to teach and you need help. This is an existential moment when you need to adapt to a rapidly changing world by being reflexive, humble, and motivated to live with impermanence.)
The lack of usefulness of anthropology departments combined with the Enrollment Cliff has the potential to adversely affect CRM archaeology, which is an essential industry in the United States. Construction is delayed and stunted when cultural resources evaluations cannot be granted in a timely manner. The rapid decrease in CRMers will have widespread economic impacts if we cannot find trained archaeologists to do cultural resource evaluations. It could also result in governments eliminating requirements for CRM assessments because there aren’t enough archaeologists to do the work. This would mean the end of CRM as an industry.
(FYI: Academia and CRM are symbionts. Academia can exist without CRM but CRM cannot exist without academia. CRMers, if you don’t get off your high horses and extend the olive branch you will not be able to find the people qualified to do CRM. You know what you need. Now is the time to be reflexive, humble, and motivated to live with professors in this time of impermanence. Now is the time to build a training pipeline with your local university before your competitors do.)
You need a college degree to be a CRM archaeologist
Universities are the only places where you can get a degree and CRM archaeology has not developed technical training programs that are considered equivalent to a university degree. This means CRM needs universities to keep the industry alive. CRM cannot survive without academia.
The Enrollment Cliff and opting out matters to CRM archaeology because without anthropology undergraduates, there will be fewer people to fulfill the Secretary of Interior’s Professional Standards in Archaeology. Here are the SOI standards for Archaeology:
“The minimum professional qualifications in archeology are a graduate degree in archeology, anthropology, or closely related field plus:
1. At least one year of full-time professional experience or equivalent specialized training in archeological research, administration, or management;
2. At least four months of supervised field and analytic experience in general North American archeology, and
3. Demonstrated ability to carry research to completion.
In addition to these minimum qualifications, a professional in prehistoric archeology shall have at least one year of full-time professional experience at a supervisory level in the study of archeological resources of the prehistoric period. A professional in historic archeology shall have at least one year of full-time professional experience at a supervisory level in the study of archeological resources of the historic period.”
https://www.nps.gov/articles/sec-standards-prof-quals.htm
The SOI Standards are crucial to CRM because they are typically the minimum qualifications necessary to run archaeology projects on state & federal land ttp://www.succinctresearch.com/secretary_of_the_interior_archaeology_standards/
Archaeology companies can be staffed with folks who don’t meet the SOI standards, but companies still have a strong preference for all their archaeologists to have completed a college degree in anthropology and an archaeological field school for many reasons. Archaeology students are the few people in this country who have training in the identification, excavation, and analysis of archaeological sites. A bachelor’s degree and field school has long been the preferred minimum qualifications to start a career in CRM archaeology but, eventually, each CRM company is going to need employees that meet the SOI standards because of contract stipulations created by state and federal agencies. In some states, a company cannot land a contract for CRM services unless it is conducted or overseen by someone that meets the SOI standards. And tomorrow’s graduate students are gleaned from today’s undergrads. For years CRM companies have relied on an abundance of anthropology graduates willing to endure all sorts of hardships to start a career in archaeology. But these conditions may be coming to an end.
The Enrollment Cliff and continued obsolescence of anthropology programs threatens the entire CRM industry because:
- A Bachelor’s in anthropology and a field school has long been the minimum for working in CRM archeology.
- Finding people who meet the SOI Standards is crucial for CRM companies that rely on government contracts for company revenue because government agencies require archaeology professionals that meet these standards.
- College degrees are central to meeting those standards.
- No anthropology students, No American archaeologists.
Is American archaeology on fire?
Jason Wingard called his opinion piece “Higher Ed Must Change or Die” a “burning platform” memo and compared it to a 2011 memo penned by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop who described the cell phone manufacturer’s dire straits in the face of the smartphone revolution. We all know how that turned out. Nokia went from the best-selling mobile phone brand in the world in 1998 to the shadow if its former glory that it is today.
I don’t consider this blog post a “burning platform” memo. I don’t think American archaeology is on fire because I feel more like it is actually in an exciting ascendancy phase:
- More money is being spent on archaeology than ever before.
- There are continued discoveries across the United States.
- New technologies provide means to re-evaluate what we once knew and make more discoveries.
- More than half of all archaeologists are women. Even if they are not equally represented in management positions today, they will be tomorrow.
- Harassment is starting to be addressed by archaeology organizations. #Metoo in archaeology is going beyond a simple hashtag.
- Indigenous and African American influences are pushing the boundaries of inclusivity and changing dominant narratives. This is slow going but it is gaining traction.
- Community-based fieldwork in academia is becoming normative in academia even if it’s not perfect. This means students today are being trained in an environment where collaborating with local people is becoming normalized. I hope this means closer collaboration between CRM firms, agencies, and communities in the future.
Most importantly: CRMers are slowly realizing there is a huge problem with the way they’ve been conducting business. CRMers are realizing:
- They can’t keep treating employees like trash. They have to actually do stuff to retain employees because the gravy train is slowing down.
- Some of the flexibility earned from the Pandemic is getting locked in. Working from home isn’t seen as a fake vacation like it used to be. This has the potential to make CRM more palatable to parents. It also has the chance to lower CRM company overhead costs.
- Companies are starting to post salaries in their job postings, suggesting some increased transparency. Fingers crossed that it means higher wages and benefits.
- And some companies are cultivating relationships with universities to provide the workplace training they’ve been asking universities to provide since the 1970s. They’ve realized academia isn’t going to change fast enough so they’re taking the horse by the reins and leading it to water. A select number of companies are doing something about this.
Meanwhile, academia is still on the same track it’s been on since before World War II:
- There are fewer tenure track jobs than ever before, but academia keeps pretending like they’re preparing PhD students for these non-existent jobs (FYI: They aren’t because they can’t).
- Academia is still making PhD students think a tenure-track job is the only form of success in archaeology, even though principal investigators in CRM archaeology make more than most assistant professors and a $hitload more than adjunct faculty (FYI: Tenure track at a bad institution is way worse than CRM).
- Assistant professors are still recruited based on amorphous attributes that are unrelated to their fitness to teach students how to do archaeology.
- Assistant professors with CRM experience are rarely hired, which means the department is even less capable to prepare students for a career in archaeology.
- Adjunctification is getting worse and anthropology departments are helping make it worse by making PhD students think they need to be part of this payola scam if they want to become tenure track professors someday (FYI: They don’t).
- Academicians still treat graduate students like $hit.
- They still aren’t recruiting or supporting BIPOC students.
- They still aren’t supporting BIPOC faculty. Believe me, nothing sucks more than being Black in a department where you don’t belong with faculty who deny the fact that they’re the problem.
- They’re still focusing on NSF, Wenner-Gren, and other high stakes grant funding rather than capitalizing their own research through partnerships with government agencies. A $20,000 Wenner-Gren is lionized despite the fact that there are tens of millions of dollars to be had in government contracts specifically set aside for universities.
- They still aren’t connecting with Native American tribes in productive ways even though these universities have departments that, since their origins, who have built their entire reputation on digging up Native heritage sites. Universities still haven’t repatriated Native grave goods and human remains items despite the fact that NAGPRA told them to do so 32 years ago.
- They still aren’t connecting with underrepresented minority communities despite the huge reciprocal benefits that could be found in collaborating with local ethnic communities.
- They still aren’t supporting poor students of all races and genders, preferring to focus on affluent students who can afford to take 6 weeks off to take a summer field school and spend evenings working the unpaid internships that fuel academic research.
- Professors never retire and there is no mechanism to force them to. Their bad habits resonate for decades. Curriculum remains trapped 40 years behind the curve. It remains irrelevant for students who want careers in archaeology or in academia.
Worse of all— These aged professors prevent anything from changing because that threatens everything they thought they knew about archaeology. Being wrong is the #1 thing older professors are afraid of. Telling them so will threaten your career so nobody goes against them.
The world is changing. Higher education is changing. CRM is changing. Archaeology is changing. Anthropology departments are not changing.
The Enrollment Cliff and irrelevance of anthropology departments threatens the whole of American archaeology, but all is not lost. Archaeologists created this system, so it is up to archaeologists to address it. I do not think cultural resource management archaeology is going to freeze up in the near future but there is a real danger that it will evaporate in the next generation if we do not act today.
Write a comment below or send me an email.
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