Hi, we've got 3 charts for you today:
685,000 fewer students were enrolled in post-secondary education in America this spring, a 4.1% fall on 2021, which itself was a 3.5% fall on the numbers from 2020 according to data out yesterday from the NSC Research Center. That fall marks the 11th straight year that the spring count of total enrollments has dropped in the US.
The college conundrum
The biggest drop came in undergraduates, as 662,000 fewer undergraduates enrolled — a 4.7% drop on the year before. Community college numbers fell almost 8%.Part of that fall could be explained away by the pandemic, where remote-learning distinctly diminished the college experience, but the scale and consistency of the declines suggest something larger is at play: college is losing its allure.
Once the golden ticket to a middle class life, the rise in the cost of college has outstripped the rise in the cost of living many times over in the last 50 years, suggesting that the math of the college decision is, for some prospective students, not adding up anymore.
Interestingly, the most well-known institutions are bucking this trend. The acceptance rate at Harvard plunged to an all-time low (~3%). The same happened at Stanford... and Yale... and Brown... and Columbia (to name but a few). The college path might not make quite as much sense for everyone as it used to, but the big name institutions aren't the ones losing out.
This week Apple released its latest research on the App Store, in a bid to persuade the public — and more importantly policymakers — that the app economy under its control is thriving, and that Apple's continued stewardship of it is a good thing. The research finds that the iOS app economy now supports 2.2 million jobs in the US.
A two horse race
In the last decade the software of Apple (iOS) and Android, the latter of which is Google's mobile operating system, have come to dominate the global mobile operating system market. Google's stroke of genius was to make Android free and open source, allowing companies to freely build on top of the Android OS.
Both bring in tens of billions for their respective owners, and together they account for more than 99% of all mobile operating systems according to data from StatCounter.
Lawmakers haven't completely missed the memo, and app stores are the latest way that governments are looking to regulate big tech. Legislation is moving through Congress, and European lawmakers are looking at the Digital Markets Act to help foster competition on the platforms and create choice for consumers.
The US government is still "living beyond its means", with the federal budget deficit expected to come in at $1 trillion for this year according to new forecasts from the CBO.
That's a huge amount of money, but it is actually way down on the $3 trillion or so that the deficit has averaged over the last two years, when government spending dramatically increased in response to the pandemic as multiple stimulus checks, tax credits and other relief programs were introduced. As the chart above shows, those deficits were worth almost 13-15% of the entire value of the US economy.
Debt on your debt
Going forward the CBO forecasts that the US federal deficit is likely to steadily rise from around 4% of GDP this year to around 6% of GDP by 2032. Incredibly, less than half of that estimated deficit is actually from spending — the majority is actually just interest payments on debt we already owe.
1) Putting the $52bn of aid to Ukraine in context — 4 charts from the NYTimes.
2) Netflix needs a big hit after revealing it is losing subscribers... and it's banking on the latest season of Stranger Things, which cost $30m per episode, to do the trick.
3) Analysis from FiveThirtyEight suggests that support for gun control, and media attention on the subject, is likely to rise in the wake of the Robb Elementary shooting — but that it might not last forever.
4) One for the OG chart nerds: the beauty of charting software all the way back to the 1980s.
5) Join 400,000 subscribers — including managing directors at some of Wall Street’s largest institutions — who trust The Daily Upside to make them smarter investors.**
6) The number of homes for sale in the US is up 9% on this time last year, as sellers look to join in on the red-hot real estate market.
7) The UK government has announced a 25% extra windfall tax on energy companies, which have seen surging revenues in recent months.
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