<p>OT: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>There’s no question that school-age population is declining in the Northeast, and has been for quite a while. That’s also the case in the upper Midwest, but not in the South, Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, Mountain States. etc. And even in the Northeast, the rate of population decline overall reflects a much larger decline in the number of white kids net of a huge increase in Hispanic kids . . . but I’ll bet that Hispanic increase has been slow to manifest itself in most Westchester towns.</p></li>
<li><p>But also . . . the number of kids in high school is only part of the picture. Of the (somewhat reduced) number of kids in high school, more are finishing high school, and more of them are going to college than ever before. Again, you wouldn’t likely notice that in Westchester, because you can’t increase graduation/college rates by much over 99.9%. But in those fast-growing Hispanic populations, educational expectations are also growing fast, and so are high-school graduation and college enrollment rates.</p></li>
<li><p>Then there is another factor with the potential to swamp everything else. There are a couple billion people in Asia who value education highly, who have rising incomes (and appreciating currencies), and who believe that their best students should be educated in the United States. A couple billion people can easily generate a few thousands of good-faith candidates for selective American universities. So even if the number of Americans applying to college were going down, the number of PEOPLE applying to college is staying constant and probably growing. And all of this is before you start thinking about how many applications each of those kids is filing.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Bottom line: The baby bust is real, but it’s not affecting college applications much!</p>