An article by this headline in today’s Washington Post discusses an impending decline in high school graduates next year “in many parts of the nation” and a significant shift in the racial composition of classes applying to colleges. We’re not talking about a nationwide shift yet, if ever, but as is the case in all heterogeneous dynamic systems, interesting effects will hit specific cross sections of universities first. My favorite quote in the article:

Schools in more remote areas, with fewer resources and no particular academic focus, could struggle, said Steven Roy Goodman, an educational consultant and admissions strategist. That is why the 700-student Northland College in Wisconsin uses its location on Lake Superior to promote it as “the environmental liberal arts college.”

“To use the obvious ecological metaphor, we must specialize in our niche, because we can’t compete with dramatically better-resourced generalists,” Provost Rich Fairbanks said.

I generally find comparisons to ecosystems pretty sexy.  My experience tells me there are amazing parallels between organization identity and organism niche that make the lessons of one apply quite neatly to the other more often than would be apparent.  I still remember the graphs of biotic population dynamics I encountered in my advanced ecology class at Williams that showed that stable coexistence of organisms was only possible when their specializations were sufficiently disparate.  It’s a story of competition-management that plays out all over, from the small colleges of Wisconsin, to the SLACs of the Northeast, to botanical gardens sharing a climate zone and region.