Let’s Be Frank: ABA Is About To Plunge Over A Demographic Cliff. Can It Survive The Landing?

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[About this post: (1) For ease of expression I will use “college” and “university” interchangeably. (2) Although the fate of higher education affects all of behavior analysis, my focus is on ABA because that’s our discipline’s 800-pound gorilla. (3) No apologies for this post being U.S.-centric, because whatever affects ABA’s largest market is, by actuarial definition, kind of a big deal. Oh, and FWIW, birth-rate issues aren’t unique to the U.S.]


Today, February 5, would have been the 98th birthday of my father, Frank E. Critchfield, who was a case study in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. He was the first in a poor Sandyville, WV, family to go to college, and the only one in his high school graduating class to do so. Along the way to earning a PhD in Chemistry he received exactly zero family support — they were in no position to fund the effort, which in any case they perceived as impractical and self-indulgent.

Dad pressed on anyway and made the most of his opportunities, ultimately writing more than 70 U.S. patents, two books, and over 50 peer-reviewed articles. He earned a good living and was able to empower the next generation by putting four kids through college. Oh, and if you’re sitting in a comfy chair, thank Frank, because his research spawned the first commercial applications of tush-cushioning polyurethane foam [This work helped to propel his company into the Flexible Polyurethane Foam Hall of Fame. Seriously, that’s a thing.].

Sandyville circa 1930, Frank in college, one of Frank’s books, and flexible polyurethane foam.

Although Dad was one of the hardest workers you’d ever meet, he didn’t make miracles happen on his own. The G.I. Bill paid for his Bachelor’s degree, and graduate study was… creatively financed. Dad ran the Chemistry Department library in exchange for a sleeping room in the building’s unheated attic; got a stipend for teaching undergraduate labs; and through a sort of work-study program received two meals a day for working food service. And fortunately for my cash-strapped pop, tuition was extremely low due to the then-popular custom of states heavily subsidizing college costs.

In short, Dad was lucky. Poor Appalachian kids don’t get a lot of breaks in this life, but at the time he went to college, U.S. society viewed higher education as a worthy investment in the future. Without that investment, Dad was just another kid in one of the most disadvantaged parts of the country for whom higher education would not have been an option. Keep that in mind as we shift this discussion toward ABA’s future.

I’ve been thinking about my dad’s journey because 2025 marks the start of the long-anticipated, and much-dreaded, “Demographic Cliff,” as higher-education folks refer to it.

Declining birth rates will soon create a precipitous decline in the availability of college aged students to the U.S. higher education system. The number of individuals ripe for the plucking as college freshmen will drop annually until, by 2039, there will be 15% fewer per year than we’re currently accustomed to. This is going to create a higher education landscape that my dad wouldn’t recognize and that is likely to create substantial problems for ABA.

You can find out more about the Demographic Cliff and its fallout in the Postscript (“The Cliff and Its Consequences, in 9 Graphs“), but here’s the gist of the problem: No business (and higher education is a business) can weather a 15% reduction in revenue without adverse consequences.

When the Cliff hits and enrollments plummet, universities will be forced to become more financially conscious. And there are limits to what can be accomplished with undergraduate education because no matter what universities do there won’t be enough of these students to go around. As a result, you’ll see university administrators focus on enhancing other revenue streams. One popular approach: Turning graduate programs into cash cows, including by:

  • Eliminating programs that serve just a few students per year and require lots of expensive faculty.
  • Raising the cost of graduate tuition.
  • Pushing for high-volume programs that admit a lot of students and educate them en masse, using minimal faculty resources (think of large of lecture-based and/or asynchronous online courses, with no practical experience component).
  • Making graduate students pay full tuition (i.e., curtailing financial support mechanisms). For instance, the President of my university is on record as opposing all graduate stipends, regardless of source (research grants, field placement contracts, university fund, etc.). This kind of thinking will soon shape public universities into something more akin to expensive for-profit institutions.

I hope it’s obvious that none of these changes will support what we consider to be good graduate training. To appreciate how ABA will be affected, let’s start with a quick appraisal of the status quo.

In that status quo, we are already struggling to keep up with demand, as there’s a need for about twice as many qualified practitioners as currently exist.

And who those practitioners are very much matters.

The analysis in applied behavior analysis comes from people with advanced degrees, that is, the close to 80,000 folks who are certified at the Masters and Doctoral level who run programs and supervise a vast army of Registered Behavior Technicians (RBT; almost 200,000 of them) who implement many treatment plans. Nothing against RBTs, but they’re not typically the brains of the practitioner movement. And fortunately our best ABA graduate programs are conscientious about building good professional repertoires. They have favorable student-to-faculty ratios, admit relatively few students each year, and give them intensive didactic attention, supervisory feedback, and practical experience. In many cases a graduate stipend or paid work at a clinical placement defrays the substantial expense of graduate school.

In other words, model ABA graduate programs are exactly the resource-intensive operations that cost-averse administrators are going to abhor, and no doubt some of those programs will simply cease to exist (in their current form, at least). This will be a shame because if graduate-level practitioners become more scarce we can expect to see even more of the burden of service delivery shifted to RBTs. That won’t be good for clients.

Graduate school is going to cost more, and in-house financial support is going to become scarce. Therefore many students will have to forego graduate training or, to in order to pursue it, assume massive student loan debt — which they will subsequently be able to pay off only by working excessively, which is a recipe for burnout. That isn’t good for clients.

We’ll see more Large N graduate programs that provide questionable (some would say predatory) degrees at exorbitant cost. When you imagine a small number of faculty trying to teach and mentor an annual entering class of 40, 80, or 200 students, well, it’s obvious that this won’t be good for clients.

Frank, circa 1989, looking grim about the future of ABA.

And although the rising cost of graduate school and the squeeze on student financial support will cause pain, it won’t be equally distributed across students. Unfortunately for a discipline that’s already way too homogeneous (we’re only slightly more diverse than the Flexible Polyurethane Foam Hall of Fame), those most affected will be members of underrepresented groups, because in the U.S. economic opportunity is highly correlated with race, ethnicity, and culture. So if anyone gets shut out, or becomes so overburdened with debt that they burn out, it’s likely to be people best equipped to provide culturally responsive services. And of course this cannot be good for clients.

To sum up, in every imaginable way the future that awaits us on the other side of the Demographic Cliff is one that will harm clients, hinder the profession of ABA, and deny opportunity to lots of talented students, especially those, like my dad, who could not rise above their circumstances without the help of a supportive system. Although I don’t pretend that the challenges facing a poor Appalachian kid are the same as those for members of other disadvantaged groups, it seems pretty obvious that if you transport 17-year-old Frank Critchfield to, say, 2032, he may not make it to college at all, much less earn the Ph.D. that lifts him from poverty, fuels his professional contributions, and spawns enough generational wealth to funds his kids’ education. There’s no reason to expect anything different for lots of other talented people, some of whom otherwise might be on track to becoming much-needed Future Behavior Analysts.

Image of unknown provenance from all over the internet.

From its conception, the science of behavior has been portrayed as a force for good. Think of Skinner’s vision for a kinder, gentler society; of Baer et al.’s (1968) laser focus on socially important behavior change; and of the many efforts, in places like Behavior and Social Issues, to suggest how the biggest and thorniest social problems might be resolved. There has always been a sense that behavioral technology must be a tool for enriching lives and making the world a better place.

If that’s so — if we really believe our own public relations patter — then what’s about to come down in higher education should be a first-priority issue for us. ABA can be a force for good only to the extent that it’s healthy, and nothing that flows from the Demographic Cliff will make it better.

To prosper, ABA needs person power that’s ample, well-trained, and diverse. And part of being a force for good means offering opportunity — ways for individuals who seek to be part of the solution to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Our dual responsibility, then, is to liberally spread behavior analysis across the world AND to freely invite all comers into behavior analysis. When the higher education system comes unglued, our capacity to do both will be compromised.

The problems created by the Demographic Cliff won’t magically solve themselves. What kind of terrifies me is that I hear little systematic discussion among behavior analysts about how we’re going to protect our discipline from its ravages. I’m sure there are some who simply trust that ABA is so popular that destructive forces won’t affect us. Trusting is one strategy… though not one that inspires confidence.

Most people who work at universities already know about the Demographic Cliff, and it has been much discussed in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m suggesting only that we — not just university folks, but everyone with a stake in the vitality of ABA — zoom out and ask how the Cliff it will affect ABA’s big picture. And I certainly recommend we consider what might be done to soften the blow.

Since this is an economic problem at heart, there really are only two general strategies that can help. One is to boost revenue. In theory this could mean raising prices to generate more cash per paying customer, but let’s face it: College already is prohibitively expensive. Alternatively, one could try to manufacture more paying customers, but given the limits of contemporary biological knowledge that solution takes a couple of decades to implement. [A shorter timeline is required to recruit more foreign nationals as prospective students, and this has some appeal in terms of diversifying ABA, but university officials thought up this trick a long time ago, and lots of institutions are already scrambling after this pool of students. Oh, and even if lots of foreign recruits can be rounded up, it’s likely to soon become much more difficult to get them legally into the country.]

The other general strategy is to somehow insulate ABA programs from closure, resource starvation, and pressure to explode the student-to-faculty ratio. Historically, the go-to leverage for resourcing graduate programs is pressure from accrediting bodies. According to the conventional wisdom, program accreditation brings status to a university, making it willing to spend to keep programs accredited. And it’s true that if an accrediting body thinks a program is under-resourced, it will recommend boosting staffing or other resources. But whether that recommendation has teeth is another question.

For U.S. medical schools, to cite one example, accreditation does have teeth, because for all practical purposes you can’t get licensed without graduating from an accredited program. Universities can care more about the bottom line than individual graduates (sorry, it’s a business), and hence medical school is expensive … But if your program isn’t accredited, students aren’t going to pony up tuition, and so if an accrediting body says you need more faculty or better labs, then you do simply to stay open.

By contrast, we must be honest about the value of behavior analysis program accreditation: At best it’s pretty diffuse (e.g., check out this vague explanation from ABAI). Most importantly, accreditation is linked to ABA professional certification in only one of four “pathways” that practitioners can pursue.

Four pathways to ABA certification, only one of which requires graduation from an accredited training program. Image credit: Behavior Analyst Certification Board Certification Handbook.

Here’s the telling statistic: Of all the behavior analysis graduate programs out there, only 41 are accredited by ABAI. The Association for Professional Behavior Analysts also has an accreditation program, but as far as I can tell it has accredited no programs. Clearly, tons of practitioners are moving successfully into the work force without the backing of program accreditation.

That means paying customers (students) have little motivation to prefer accredited programs, and universities have little motivation to pursue accreditation or do what accrediting bodies say. As things currently stand, then, accreditation offers no meaningful cover for grad programs that are going to be affected by the Demographic Cliff.

It could potentially be different if professional certification was only available to graduates of accredited programs. And here there’s really good news: Starting in 2032, the Behavior Analyst Certification Board will allow only Pathway 1 (graduation from an accredited program) as the basis for pursuing certification. It’s great that this change is coming, though by the time it arrives the Demographic Cliff may have already wreaked considerable havoc. Too little too late perhaps? In my perfect world, we would speed up the time line, although I’m sure there are practical challenges, because you can’t re-tool a system as massive as certification overnight.

I’m not pretending I have all of the answers. I know I’m not even asking all of the right questions given the multiple scales on which the Cliff’s consequences will be felt. Consider, for instance, the fate of individual graduate programs. What can the people responsible for them do locally to buffer themselves from higher education’s winds of change? Probably we should be developing tools and strategies so that each program needn’t flail away in trial and error fashion. In that regard, what are the best ways to persuade administrators? And, that failing, what are prudent strategies for giving them them some of what they want while still maintaining reasonable quality standards? Do we know what program features are most worth fighting for? It’s unclear to me that we have sufficient empirical guidance to decide what aspects of the graduate training experience are most correlated with success in the field (and thus least expendable). And so forth.

All I know for sure is that complex problems require lots of problem solvers, and this one, The Cliff, affects pretty much all of us. Now is the time for a clear-eyed appraisal of the problem, for individuals to engage with it and ask the institutions that serve our discipline to do the same. I invite representatives of various stakeholder groups, and indeed anyone with something useful to say, to comment on the problem, my portrayal of it, and prospects for solutions. I’ll make space for you in the Something Interesting column. Email me (tscritc@ilstu.edu).


Image credit: Lydia Sidholm, Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here’s a quick summary of the Demographic Cliff.

+ The U.S. higher education system was created based on certain assumptions about demand, that is, on the number of individuals that need to be to be educated.

+ Declining birth rates now violate those assumptions, meaning that soon there will not be enough humans to fill out the freshman class of U.S. universities (right).

+ Barring large-scale immigration into the U.S., or the importing of vast numbers of foreign students, there is no way to change this trend for the coming couple of decades.

Shrinking enrollments matter A LOT because contemporary U.S. higher education is, for all practical purposes, a private enterprise. The state financial support that assured affordable college access has long been eroding, with the biggest changes coming after about 2000. Due to shifting public attitudes about paying taxes and the cost of government, state support has eroded to the point where most “public” universities receive virtually no public money at all.

Here’s an example for one of the great “public” universities, University of Iowa. State appropriations once justified the “public” label but now account for a small proportion of overall operating budget. And this a far from the worst-case scenario — consider University of Virginia (11%) and University of New Hampshire (8%).

Image credit: Iowa Board of Regents.

As this post was going to press, sudden changes in government policy put federal research funding in jeopardy, which is relevant because some institutions have addressed shrinking state funding by relying more heavily on research grants and contracts. Such funds can constitute a significant portion of a university’s budget. Examples:

InstitutionFederal State Appropriations
Cal-Berkeley14%14%
University of Wisconsin25%*14%
University of Florida26%*23%
West Virginia University17%15%
Source: University annual reports.
* Budget reports were ambiguous, so total could include federal funds other than research grants and contracts.

Loss of grants and contracts will only exacerbate the economic crisis already unfolding in higher education. And, of course, this will compromise science too — including that focused on behavioral processes and interventions.

Without enough paying customers, colleges must find ways to cut costs. Some are shedding degree programs, and the expensive faculty that go with them (salaries are every university’s biggest cost).

A high-profile example unfolded recently at my dad’s alma mater, West Virginia University, which under intense budgetary pressure cut dozens of degree programs and shed about 150 faculty positions. One of the cuts would especially sadden my dad: a Bachelor’s in Chemistry. Here’s the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s analysis of the problem at WVU, among which two points loom large: regression in state funding is largely to blame, and WVU should be considered the proverbial canary in a coal mine, meaning it’s not unique and therefore won’t be the last high profile case like this.

But program cuts may not be enough to save some institutions. According to one report, since 2020

  • 41 public or private nonprofit schools or campuses … have closed or announced planned closures.
  • 32 public or private nonprofit schools … have merged or announced mergers with other universities.

More will follow. Suffice it to say that fewer degree programs and fewer colleges translates to fewer options for people who can afford college, and fewer trained professionals.

Prior to the 1960s, tuition at public universities was low, and even free at many land-grant universities. When state funding began to lag (a long running-trend that has accelerated in the 2000s), tuition was raised to fill budgetary gaps, and you can see above that students now cover more of operating budgets than states. In this sense there are few truly public universities left. [The concept of “state schools” has been so undermined that some institutions, like Penn State University and University of Pittsburgh, are now officially considered merely state related, that is, “institutions that are not state-owned and -operated but that have the character of public universities.” Whatever that means.]

And how else could it be? College may be a strange business, but it’s a business, and to stay open colleges have to cover costs. The only reliable way to do this has been to raise tuition. As you can see below, over time tuition rates have increased faster than the rate of inflation. Not shown in the graph: Non-tuition costs of college (like room and board) are increasing at the same pace as tuition, effectively doubling the scope of the problem.

Image credit: Noa Maltzman in Medium.

The cost of college is rising faster than income, making college less affordable relative to many other services and goods.

Image credit: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The U.S. has a growing economic disparity problem. Income has been rising for high earners but not for those on the other end of the economic spectrum.

As a result, the cost of tuition is getting further and further out of reach of low-earning individuals. Here’s an example from Ohio showing that college costs are rising much faster than the minimum wage. Thus, those in perhaps the greatest need of opportunity that comes with higher education are the least likely to be able to cover college costs. This is one reason why economic mobility is lower in the U.S. than most high-income countries (a U.S. resident born into low income is up to 4 times more likely to become a low-income adult).

Image credit: Rich Exner, Cleveland.com

In the U.S., economic well-being correlates with race, ethnicity, and culture. For example, at the aggregate level, the spending power of African-American families has been deteriorating compared to the national norm. Trends like this make college access more difficult for individuals who can enhance the diversity of a workforce.

This means that, compared to people of privilege, members of disadvantaged groups tend to have less spending power, and unfortunately the various mechanisms that aim to make college possible for low-income individuals (grants, scholarships) have not grown as fast as tuition costs.

No comment necessary.

The unbearable whiteness of being an applied behavior analyst.
Image Credit: Behavior Analyst Certification Board.

As college becomes more and more expensive, motivated students of modest means increasingly cover the cost with loans. As you can see, the total student loan debt load has been steadily rising.

Student loan debt is highest, and rising fastest, among Black Americans. Let’s unpack this using some numbers from the Educational Data Initiative.

  • Black Bachelor’s grads leave school with about $25,000 more in debt than white students.
  • The average college graduate needs about 20 years to pay off student loans and loan spread out that far creates a lot of interest. For example, a students who repays $53,000 in loans — the average amount Black Bachelor’s grads owe — at 6% interest over 20 years will accrue about $38,000 in interest payments, for a total debt load in the ballpark of $91,000.
  • The debt load of over half of Black graduates exceeds their net worth.
  • Many students report that student loan debt interferes with plans to get married, have children, and buy a home. They say it creates stress and forces them to work too much. About 2/3 of Black graduates say they regret having taken out college loans, which they do not believe contributed to economic equality.

All of the data I’ve shown you are for undergraduates — not even considering the added cost of graduate school, and the extent to which that will balloon in coming years. Here’s some context: Graduate school tuition already is higher than that for undergraduate studies. Partly as a result, grad students make up maybe 20% of all those enrolled in college, but gobble up about half of student loans. The average grad student with loans owes about $70,000. Expect that to only go up. And although graduate degrees boost earning power compared to undergraduate credentials, that earning power isn’t keeping up with rising school costs, meaning that in the foreseeable future graduate school will be demonstrably “not worth it.”


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