Declining school enrollment: why the problem is capitalism

MCPS is down about 9,000 students since 2019, and that trend is probably going to continue

Photo by mike nguyen on Unsplash

There are two main factors leading to declining public school enrollment: fewer children and fewer governments putting trust in their local public schools. Middle-range projections (5-10 years out) seem to indicate a mixed bag for areas like Montgomery County and Maryland as a whole, but the last time a projection was done for the state was long before more recent fascist anti-immigrant policies began to be enacted, meaning that even the report released by the Maryland government in 2021 is unlikely to be accurate anymore. Even reports and projections released last year may not be accurate.

Why are there fewer children?

1. National declining birth rate publicized by the CDC in July 2025

2. Fewer immigrants¹

Why are fewer children attending local public schools? That one’s way easier to explain: vouchers and charters.² While that point is a fascinating bit of information in of itself, it doesn't explain Montgomery County. After all, there is no real voucher system in Maryland, aside from the BOOST program, which is intended to help low-income families afford private schools and isn't all that well-funded in the first place. And since Montgomery County's sole charter school is failing miserably, neither of these seem to be truly encapsulating the problems faced in MCPS.

So why, instead of the state projections from last year that MCPS would roughly maintain its student population level, is Superintendent Thomas Taylor talking about MCPS losing more than 2,500 students from last school year to this? Is it only because of a lower birthrate and ICE?

I mean, yeah. But also… Montgomery County is an expensive place to live. For FY25, the median home sale price in MoCo was $641,000, ahead of second-place Howard County by $6,000 and significantly ahead of the County's other two neighbors, Prince George's and Frederick Counties ($460,490 and $515,000 respectively). DC's median home price is lower than MoCo's, too.

The result is that we have an aging population with far fewer young families being able to afford moving in. All of this means fewer kids.

Source: Montgomery County Office of Legislative Oversight, Sept. 2025

And thanks to Millenials and Gen Z having less wealth than Gen X, who in turn has significantly less wealth than Baby Boomers, this trend of declining youth population isn’t likely to change in MoCo anytime soon.

To summarize: Montgomery County is an expensive place to live, younger people can't afford to live here, so the population is aging, depending on immigration to keep County population rising. However, we have national policies that are suppressing typical immigration numbers, so overall numbers are likely to drop, to say nothing of the lack of children being born.

The school system is in a position where they don't believe opening Crown as a new high school makes sense, where closing and redistributing students from Silver Spring International Middle School makes more sense than fixing or revitalizing the building, and where we may have to begin school consolidation rather than expansion for the first time in over thirty-five years.

Yet as a County, we have an almost insatiable greed for more housing, when what is desperately needed is affordable housing. Until the NIMBYs and developer greed stop insisting on building new “luxury” homes everywhere, rather than coming up for a plan for workforce and low-income housing that doesn't rely on corporate handouts, we aren't going to see younger families moving back in to the county. They will continue to move to Prince George's, Frederick, and the new hotness that is Howard before they move here.

1. It’s worth pointing out that when a right-leaning think tank like AEI is publicizing that their net immigration projection is somewhere between −525,000 to 115,000 for 2025, it’s significant, since net immigration for the US post-panemic was over 1 million per year, and even during the pandemic, the number exceeded 300,000.

2. That’s assuming they’re attending school at all. Recent research shows that some kids simply never returned to school of any kind—not even homeschool.