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The latest population report released by the United Nations pointed out that nearly one-fifth of countries and regions, including China, Italy, South Korea and Spain, are now facing "ultra-low fertility rates", with the average number of children born to women in their lifetime being less than 1.4.

The report shows that as of 2024, the population of 63 countries and regions, including China, Germany, Japan and Russia, has peaked, and the total population of these countries and regions is expected to decrease by 14% in the next three decades. China may experience the largest population loss between 2024 and 2054, with a population reduction of 204 million people.

Will colleges and universities face a student recruitment crisis amid the trend of declining birthrates? In June this year, He Zubin, Party Secretary and Professor of the Faculty of Education of Guangxi Normal University, and Guo Caiqing, a research assistant of the Faculty of Education, jointly published a paper titled "Prediction of Supply and Demand of Higher Education Students and Crisis Warning from 2024 to 2050 under the Trend of Declining Birthrates - An Analysis Based on Data from China's Seventh Population Census".

The above research predicts that my country's higher education will usher in a historic "student source turning point" around 2038, which may lead to a crisis in the number and quality of students, and cause an imbalance in the higher education ecosystem. In this regard, we should take multiple measures to vigorously boost the social fertility level, increase revenue and reduce expenditure to continuously enhance the student source supply capacity, establish a student source monitoring and crisis warning mechanism, and promote the adaptation of enrollment scale and ecological carrying capacity, so as to achieve a higher level of dynamic balance between the supply and demand of higher education students.

Prediction: The “inflection point of student source” will come around 2038

Two researchers, He Zubin and Guo Caiqing, used the calculation formula "supply-demand gap = supply scale - demand scale" to calculate the supply-demand gap of higher education students and found that China's higher education will usher in a historic "student source turning point" around 2038, and the supply-demand relationship of students will change from supply exceeding demand to supply falling short of demand.

This study used PADIS-INT, an internationally accepted population forecasting software, as a forecasting tool, and used SPSS27.0 software to construct an ARIMA time series forecasting model to estimate the demand for higher education students from 2024 to 2050.

Based on the forecast results, the study found that: between 2024 and 2037, the supply scale of higher education students will decrease from 15.8502 million to 14.6026 million, with an average annual decline of about 96,000; the demand scale of higher education students will increase from 10.7036 million to 13.5607 million, with an average annual increase of about 219,800, forming a demand gap that will shrink from 5.1466 million to 169,800.

Between 2038 and 2050, the demand for higher education students will increase from 14.7202 million to 18.1686 million. According to the three scenarios of the low scenario under the pessimistic scenario, the medium scenario under the stable scenario, and the high scenario under the optimistic scenario, the supply of students may decrease from 11.98 million to 6.4501 million, 8.2008 million, and 9.9517 million, respectively, resulting in a supply gap that will expand from 2.7402 million to 11.7185 million, 9.9678 million, and 8.2169 million, respectively.

This means that from 2038 to 2050, the supply of higher education students will be less than the demand. The supply of students will change from a surplus in the previous period to a shortage, and the gap between supply and demand of students will also change from a demand gap to a supply gap, and will show a significant trend of continuous expansion.

The gap between supply and demand of higher education students from 2024 to 2050. Screenshot of the paper

What are the effects of insufficient student supply?

The above research points out that in the context of a declining population and universal higher education, the combined impact of excessive expansion of higher education and a decrease in the number of students of school age will lay the groundwork for a "student source crisis" and may further trigger a student quality crisis.

The study further elaborated that when the number of students decreases, some private colleges and technical colleges that are highly dependent on tuition income may compete to lower admission scores to attract more students. The direct consequence of this is that the quality of students decreases. Because college entrance examination scores are one of the important indicators for evaluating the quality of students, students with low college entrance examination scores are often weak in learning interest, learning attitude, learning ability, knowledge base, etc. Therefore, the lower the college entrance examination scores of admitted students, to a certain extent, the worse the quality of students in the school, which will affect the teaching effect and the quality of talent training.

In addition, the above research explains that the decline in student supply will also cause idleness and waste of educational and teaching resources. Insufficient enrollment and inefficient resource utilization will trigger financial crises in some universities and career crises for teachers and administrators. Eventually, some universities will be forced to reduce their scale of operation, merge and reorganize, take over and transform, or go bankrupt due to poor management. If things go on like this, it will form a vicious cycle of "reduced number of students - lower admission scores - lower quality of students - decline in teaching quality - serious shortage of enrollment - survival crisis".

The study believes that under this cycle mechanism, if the enrollment scale is still expanded significantly and beyond the norm in the future, the number of students entering the higher education system will increase, and the scale of students on campus, that is, the system carrying capacity, will also increase. Once the scale carrying capacity exceeds the maximum threshold that the internal resources of the higher education system and the external environment can bear, it will lead to a disharmony between the scale development of higher education and the ecological carrying capacity of the higher education system, thus breaking the dynamic balance between the various elements within the system and between it and the external environment, and ultimately triggering an ecological crisis in higher education.

How to deal with the "student source crisis" in higher education

The study believes that before the "student source crisis" comes in full force around 2038, we should make good use of the strategic window period of the next 14 years, give full play to the forward-looking role of population forecasting in education strategic planning, and promote the adaptive and sustainable development of higher education student demand and population supply.

The countermeasures and suggestions proposed by the researchers include, on the one hand, facing the traditional school-age students and improving the actual student conversion rate. In the future, higher education will become the "basic education" of the new labor force, and measures should be taken to expand the supply of higher education opportunities. First, fully liberalize the college entrance examination in other places, abolish the restrictions on college entrance examination registration, and implement a system of evenly allocating enrollment indicators according to the number of candidates in the source area, so as to promote the equalization of the quantity and quality of higher education admission opportunities for children of migrant workers; second, extend the compulsory education period to high school, solve the problems of enrollment and dropout in the pre-enrollment stage of higher education, prevent the loss of school-age students, and effectively alleviate the shortage of student supply; third, learn from foreign experience, and attract international students to supplement the supply of domestic students by providing high-quality educational resources, providing scholarships and financial support, optimizing support services for international students, carrying out cultural exchanges and activities, and providing employment opportunities. On the other hand, break the traditional enrollment restrictions and expand the basic source of students. Higher education should not only meet the personalized needs of traditional students for high-quality educational resources, but also meet the diversified needs of "non-traditional students" for continuing higher education.

The researchers also suggested that in order to establish a student source monitoring and crisis warning mechanism, we should make full use of modern information technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and mobile Internet to strengthen population data statistics, establish shared and open information platforms for education, public security, civil affairs, health, medical insurance, and social security, and realize the integrated sharing and dynamic updating of basic population service information from multiple departments, so as to provide timely and authoritative data services for closely monitoring regional population change trends and accurately grasping the supply and demand of higher education students.

On the other hand, a warning and withdrawal mechanism for higher education students should be established to ensure early assessment, early warning, and early response. University administrators should have a sense of crisis and worry, monitor and analyze data such as the number of births, the number of high school graduates, the number of college entrance examination applicants, the scale of university enrollment, and the completion of enrollment plans in their area, and conduct risk assessments. When risk data reaches the corresponding level of warning threshold, a warning of student source crisis should be issued to universities as soon as possible, and measures such as optimizing professional structure, reducing enrollment plans, government takeover, and mergers and acquisitions should be implemented to effectively prevent and resolve student source crises.