Welcome, America, to the Baby Bust

Unable to find enough young people to flip its Big Macs, McDonald's has launched a recruiting program called McMasters to entice older Americans into staffing its grills and cash registers. Competitor Wendy's offers cash incentives, scholarships and "career ladders" to hang on to teenage employees. Dow Chemical, vilified on college campuses during the Viet Nam War for manufacturing napalm, is reaching out to young people in television commercials that show freshly minted college graduates signing on to help feed the world. Across the U.S., colleges are out hustling for freshmen in innovative ways: the University of Rochester offers a tuition-free fifth year that allows students to explore fields apart from their majors.

Just as the first members of the baby boom are settling into middle age, here comes the downsized baby bust -- and the scramble to adjust to an era of smaller, leaner and less in most aspects of American society. Baby busters are children born between 1965 and 1980, when the U.S. birthrate took a dive, thanks to the Pill, legalized abortion and shifts away from the traditional family. Result: total births in the U.S. dropped from 72.5 million during the postwar baby-boom years to 56.6 million in the bust generation. In 1975 the birthrate sank to 14.6 newborns per 1,000 Americans, the lowest in U.S. history.

The baby boomers have jostled through life competing for education, jobs, housing. When the baby-bust generation enters adulthood, however, it may discover the benefits of doing without: without as much unemployment, without as much demand for housing or cutthroat competition for good jobs, possibly even without as much crime. But the labor force, which will grow at a slower pace, may also find itself without the ability to sustain U.S. economic expansion or support an increasingly elderly population. "Business is going to be discombobulated," says Demographics Analyst Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute. "I see the housing industry tearing its hair out. I see problems in the military. I see enormous problems headed this way with Social Security and retirement."

Though the baby bust's impact is just beginning to be felt, by the early 1990s institutions everywhere will be adjusting to the generation's smaller numbers. The change is already apparent in classrooms, where effects of population shifts are usually seen first. With a 13% drop in children ages 6 to 18 from 1975 to 1985, the number of elementary and middle schools in the U.S. declined by nearly 6,000. The typical college-age population of 18-to-24- year-olds has also begun to dwindle,from 30.1 million in 1983 to 27.8 million last year.