• At least one US college closed or merged with another during the first half of 2024.
• The Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve predicts the number of college closures will accelerate rather than slow down.
• US colleges are admitting a larger percentage of applicants than in the past, meaning our standards are slipping.
• The US has fallen to ninth among developed nations in the proportion of its population with some education after high school.
• A higher percentage of future US jobs will require post-high school education than projections indicate we will have qualified workers to fill them.

Fewer Births Means Fewer Future Workers

The real culprit here is America’s declining birth rate, resulting in a cliff of 18-year-olds who would normally be enrolling in college.

This diminishing supply of young people will contribute to “a massive labor shortage,” with an estimated six million fewer workers between now and 2032 than there are jobs needing to be filled. As just one example, McKinsey warns that production at a new $40 billion semiconductor processing facility in Arizona has been delayed due to worker shortages.

This so-called demographic cliff has been predicted ever since Americans started having fewer babies at the advent of the Great Recession around the end of 2007 — a falling birth rate that has not recovered since, except for a slight blip after the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control. 

Of course, not all future jobs will require a college education, but 43% of them will require at least bachelor’s degrees by 2031. That means more positions in the workforce will demand some kind of postsecondary credentials than Americans are now projected to earn. Shortages are predicted in teaching, health care and other fields.

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Further reading: Colbert, “Work Breaks” and Birthrates

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We Aren’t Producing Enough Workers to Sustain, Let Alone Grow

Future shortages always include healthcare, don’t they? And at a time when baby boomers are reaching the age where they’ll need more of it.

The strongest message within this data is that the US will continue to drive its world-first economy with a smaller number of workers overall…regardless of the levels of education they attain. We just haven’t produced enough babies who grow into workers who can then contribute to our economy. And that applies to your company as well.

Then here’s the clincher, the great unknown about our future workforce. The number of international students fell by 12 percent when compared to competitor countries during Donald Trump’s first term as president. Now that he is about to start a second term, 58 percent of European students say they are less interested in coming to the United States, according to a survey by the international student recruiter Keystone Education Group.

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Further reading: Without Immigrants, U.S. Working-Age Population Would Shrink

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How Do You Stay Ahead of the Hiring Crisis? Put Employee Retention First

The solution, the answer, always points to the same strategy. Retain your best workers because the future is looking Halloween-scary for sheer numbers of workers to fill the jobs we must fill in order to further our US economy as well as keep our own businesses afloat.

Employee retention is about to move from being a very, very important component to organizational success to becoming the top strategy for each organization’s very survival. And the number one way to guarantee retention success is to give your employees managers they trust.

As our company has proven for a decade-plus, Stay Interviews provide managers with a structured method to learn their employees’ greatest day-to-day needs and then meet those needs. This specific retention solution is to combine the five Stay Interview questions with skill-building for asking those questions, listening to each employee’s responses, probing to learn more, taking a full page or two of notes, and then building individualized stay plans to retain that employee longer.

The Stay Interview goal is to identify and address work-driven issues but the absolute most important goal is develop a relationship with their manager as the absolute best opportunity to retain and engage them.

Employee Retention for Organizational Success

Now is the time to plan how you will retain your best workers now to mitigate the numbers you will need to hire in the future. If you know you need to address turnover or improve engagement but aren’t sure where to start, email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and I promise to help you jump start your employee retention strategy now, so you can see results this year.

These publications contributed to this report:

Jon Marcus, Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students? The Hechinger Report, April 26, 2024

Jon Marcus, The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges — and the economy. The Hechinger Report, January 8, 2025

Robert Kelchen, Dubravka Ritter, Douglas Webber, Predicting College Closures and Financial Distress. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, December 2024

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