The next couple of years are a bad time to turn 18 if you plan on applying to a selective college. But for younger siblings life might be getting easier.

This, according to the Sunday New York Times, is all due to shifting demographics.

This year and next the annual number of high school graduates will peak at 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. We’ll then start to see a decline in the number of potential applicants. Good news if you are still in 7th or 8th grade, not so if you are in 11th or 12th.

What does this mean for colleges?

The Times notes that “while many admissions deans expect to look nostalgically on what has become, for them at least, a golden era in college admissions, some say that a letup in the admissions craze might not be so bad”.

Well, yes. It’s been a golden era for colleges partly because, as parents are all too well aware, we’ve been sending them all of our gold!

But seriously, some colleges are looking beyond their balance sheets:

“I actually think it’s kind of good,” said Monica C. Inzer, dean of admission and financial aid at Hamilton College. “We need a shakeup. I think the anxiety families are feeling right now is not the way we planned it.”

It’s refreshing to hear this. Certainly from the parent’s side of the fence it’s hard to believe that the higher education ’system’ in this country was actually planned by anyone. In many ways it’s as dysfunctional as the American health care or taxation system. But, just as we are unlikely to get either socialized medicine or a flat tax rate anytime soon, we have to adapt to the vagaries of the educational establishment and learn to navigate it as best we are able. Finding the right strategy is not always easy.

One interesting approach which works for many students is to start off at a local community college and then transfer to complete your degree. The Times writes:

The new recruiting strategies take many forms. Bucknell, Cornell, Amherst and the University of Michigan are among eight colleges and universities to receive grants from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to create partnerships with community colleges; the goal is for some of the most promising graduates of two-year schools to transfer to the elite universities for their last two years of college.

That’s one way to get a degree while hanging on to some of your gold!