It’s much more than that, it’s a decades old problem of slowing population growth and the impact from it. North America’s least favorite economicbsuccess story is the population boom after WW2. We tell ourselves tales of ingenuity and hard work but the fact is we owe much economic success to growing the population whole other countries needed to rebuild. In the context of colleges and schools, we see a decade long period of increasing domestic demand as population and education requirements grow. But, as population growth slows the colleges find themselves with enough capacity for a generation that already graduated, with no new domestic students coming. So they fill the capacity with international students, who also help fill the missing economic capacity. The recent changes leave colleges with the original problem, capacity built for boomers and their children being far too much for the children of millennials. So they’re shrinking now. The colleges are a kind of microcosm of our entire economy. Population growth is slowing long term, and economic fallout will follow. I wish I had solutions to our problems that didn’t involve a time machine. We needed to not stop building public housing 40 years ago, we put ourselves in a housing trap that’s going to be hard to get out off. Colleges are just a prominent example.
It’s climate denial dressed up. The US lawmakers wanted a chance to get their “forest managemt” narrative in front of people again.