Incorporating Changes in Race, Gender, and Academic Field at Colleges and Universities - A Comment on 'The Ebbing Tide: How Will Higher Education Adapt to Demographic Change?'

Jacob L. Vigdor (2024)'s noteworthy contribution in "The Ebbing Tide: How Will Higher Education Adapt to Demographic Change?" estimates the impact of demographic change on colleges and universities. Here, I highlight two critical factors that should be considered in a model aimed at understanding changes in college enrollment that will shape the future of higher education: college major choice and demographic diversity, including the race/ethnicity, and gender of students. More broadly, incorporating more nuanced measures of demand for institutions of higher education and their programs of study into a model of enrollment changes would be a useful extension of this work.