The Greying Realization Hits College Towns
What happens to college towns after Peak 18-Year-Old?
College towns across America are confronting a question they were never designed to answer: What happens when the students stop arriving?
Enrollment is falling at regional universities and small liberal arts colleges. For towns like Athens, Ohio, where Ohio University students once outnumbered residents, the university was more than an economic anchor—it was the town’s identity. Now that model is under stress. Fewer students mean fewer jobs, less spending, and excess capacity in economies built around September move-ins and May graduations.
This is part of what I have been calling the Greying Realization—a broader recognition that growth assumptions built into the Global North’s (and especially the U.S.’s infrastructure no longer hold. We explored this in Entering the Post-Growth Era, where declining birth rates and aging populations force entire systems to confront futures they were never designed for.
