Demography, Technology, and Higher Education: Toward a Formal Model of Educational Adaptation

Abstract

The ultimate concern of this paper is educational adaptation, that process by which the educational composition of the adult population is modified in response to changes in technology and economy. Focusing on the changing role of the college educated, the first section descriptively examines the inter- and intrasectoral components of change in educational composition of the labor force, 1929-69, and explicates the destabilizing consequences of demographic movements. The second section develops a more aggregative representation of the demand side of the labor market, utilizing a CES technology relating educated and uneducated labor and incorporating differential rates of factor augmenting technical progress, and conjoins this with an explicit model of the determinants of the educational composition of the adult population. In the context of future demographic movements, the model is employed in the third section to project a 33 percent decline in college enrollments between 1970 and 2000. The final section then places the simulated educational adaptation process in its larger social-demographic context.