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Overall apps are supposed to decrease across the nation. # of HS grads was supposed to peak with the college class of 2013.
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1. Those two statements have very little to do with one another. The second does not lend more than very, very weak support to the first.
(a) There might be a relationship if every high school graduate applying to college filed the same number of applications, or faced a strict (and low) limit on the number of permissible applications. But neither is true. A decreasing number of applicants will not translate into fewer applications if the remaining applicants apply to more schools. (By the way, I think the number of high school graduates peaked with the high school class of 2008, with a tiny decline in '09, followed by a cumulative decline of about 3% over six or seven years.
(b) There might be a relationship if a fixed percentage of graduating high schoolers applied to college. But, no, the percentage of high school graduates going to college has been increasing for three generations, and shows no sign of stopping.
(c) There might be a relationship if only U.S. high school seniors applied to college. But foreign students apply, too, in rapidly increasing numbers, at least pre-recession. China and India, in case you didn't notice, generate a fair number of applications. And even if their populations were declining (they're not), the number of applications to American colleges, starting from a small base, is likely to grow, and continue to grow, rapidly. Also, American 20-something, their wild oats spread already, often apply to go to college if they haven't been already.
2. The recession might cause applications to decrease. Or increase, since no one has anything better to do with his time.
3. We don't care about all applications in general. We care about applications at a very small number of selective colleges. And those for years have been increasing at a rate that far exceeds any population growth.
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