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College enrollment, however, dropped only fractionally, from 12.5 million to 12.4 million last fall. The schools have adjusted to the baby bust by using remedies that other U.S. institutions may soon adopt: stepping up recruitment and diversifying the population, catering to women, older people and part- timers. Recruitment budgets at four-year colleges have increased an average of 63% since 1980, and while elite Ivy League colleges still have more applicants than they can handle, some schools are spending more than $1,000 a week on television advertising. In Los Angeles, the University of Southern California has tripled its marketing staff and its scholarship fund since 1978. Says U.S.C. Director of Admissions Kathryn Forte: "I don't know where we'd be without the extensive marketing effort we've given to recruiting for the past five or six years." Says Douglas Thompson, dean of admissions at wealthy, selective Hamilton College in upstate New York: "There is a race on. There is a limited pool of students, and we are all competing for and trying to convince them we are the best place to come."
Since the highest involvement in crime occurs among young men from the ages of 15 to 18, urbanologists like Alfred Blumstein of Pittsburgh's Carnegie- Mellon University expected the crime rate to decline along with the number of teenagers. The tail end of the baby boom reached age 16 in 1977, and Blumstein predicted that the crime rate would top out a few years later, followed by a peak in the prison population as the younger hoods got enough convictions to land in jail. Sure enough, after 1980 the crime rate began declining on schedule, and the U.S. prison population is expected to peak around 1990.
That trend, though, seems to have reversed itself: the crime rate rose again in 1985 and early 1986. Blumstein offers this explanation: while there are fewer young males generally, there has been a disproportionate increase of males in the underclass. This group, with all its attendant ills of poverty, alienation and broken homes, is particularly prone to criminal behavior. "What we're seeing," says Blumstein, "is a changing social-class composition, and crime correlates with social class."
Marriage prospects should improve for women in the baby-bust generation. Women tend to marry men a few years older than themselves, and younger women will find larger numbers of potential spouses among the baby boomers. Nonetheless, demographers predict that the smaller cohort of the baby busters will form fewer families, resulting in less demand for housing and household goods. By the middle of the next decade, the number of new households a year could drop to 1.2 million, down from an average of 1.7 million during the 1970s. Says George Sternlieb, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University: "You simply are not going to have that demand for starter homes that dominated our housing thinking for the past 40 years." That will slow homebuilding to about equal to what it was during the crisis years of the early 1980s. It will hurt retailers of durable goods. By 1992 sales of furniture will be about 30% lower than they were in 1982. Manufacturers expect that the growth in consumer electronics sales, now booming along at a record high 14% a year, will slow to about half that rate.