Its been my experience that downturns in general lead to increased competition for enrollment. When people lose their jobs, they try to get education to get a new job. It used to be say 20 years or so ago, that the majority of college acceptances were from high school. Sometime in the 90’s (early I think) it switched to being more JC transfer students and re-curving professionals. For example in my computer science program we were almost equally divided between kids like me going through the system for the fist time, vs adults who were already in the work world and re-curving to make a better living.
