1.1 Children Per Woman: The Number That Will Empty Classrooms Before AI Ever Gets the Chance

What’s Already Real, Numbers in Hand

Colombia recorded 433,678 births in 2025, a 4.5% drop from the previous year and the lowest level in a decade, according to the DANE’s technical bulletin from this past March. The fertility rate hit a historic low: 1.1 children per woman. For scale: in 2008 the country topped 715,000 births a year; today it’s more than 280,000 fewer, a nearly 40% contraction in under twenty years (DANE, via Infobae; El Tiempo). It already shows up in schools: K-12 enrollment fell 9% over the last decade to 9.3 million students, its lowest level in ten years, and La República projects a further drop of up to 38.4% (Forbes Colombia; La República). The children who weren’t born are, with arithmetic precision, the college students who will be missing fifteen years from now. This isn’t a hypothesis. It’s already in the curve.

What Nobody Tells You: Universities Are Already Reshuffling, Without Waiting for Demographics

While we wait for the demographic hit, Colombia’s university market has already changed quietly. Universidad Central went from 10,118 students in 2020 to 6,883 in 2024. Universidad Católica de Colombia lost 2,548 enrollments over the same stretch. Universidad Autónoma de Colombia — now under intervention by the Ministry of Education — collapsed from 8,107 students in 2016 to just 563 in 2024, a 93% drop (Infobae). At the other extreme, UNAD — virtual, distance-learning, cheap — went from 107,701 to 172,315 students: the fastest-growing institution in the entire country. That’s not explained by the birth-rate drop, which has barely begun to hit university-age cohorts. It’s explained by something more uncomfortable: today’s high-school graduate has less money, less time and more digital options — and punishes the expensive, in-person, legacy-prestige model first. The United States is living its own version: WICHE projects a 13% drop in high-school graduates through 2041, and economist Nathan Grawe calculates 15% fewer college-age people between 2025 and 2029 (Edvisorly). The “enrollment cliff” isn’t a Colombian quirk; it’s a wave breaking in several countries at once.

So Should We Worry That AI Will Replace Us?

My honest answer: less than you think, and for a different reason than you’d expect. Colombia already has 865 active AI-related academic programs, with 90 more in the pipeline, offered across 190 higher-education institutions (Infobae). The problem isn’t a shortage of AI programs: it’s that only 25% of universities offer one, and fewer than 24% of the country’s graduates come from STEM fields. In other words, the gap isn’t “human versus machine” — it’s between the handful of institutions redesigning their curricula in time and the many that will keep graduating people for a labor market that no longer looks like that. And that market, per the calculation from The Economist we covered today in the Daily Briefing, is rewarding people who know how to work with AI, hard: 730,000 jobs above trend since 2022 in engineering, software development, mathematics and data science (Daily Briefing #0028). AI isn’t cancelling your career. The university that fails to adapt, combined with fewer students footing the bill, can very well cancel itself.

If you’re a student, a parent, or weighing what to study — or where to invest your training over the next five years — the question I’ll leave you with isn’t whether an algorithm will take your job. It’s whether the institution where you’re putting your time and your money is built for the 2031 market, or still for the 2015 one. That’s a decision that rests entirely on your own judgment.

If you want to keep this conversation going with fresh data every morning, I’ll be waiting in the ViSFI Daily Briefing — and if this was useful, share it with anyone choosing a career path right now.