WtF: The Decline in Scuba Participation

[boulderjohn]

A Time Magazine report a couple decades ago said that the Ivy League schools were so well-endowed that they could let all students attend for free, and their endowment would still grow.

 

[drrich2]

Different schools have different student target populations, and they enroll accordingly. That very much includes state schools. Some of the colleges in the NY state system are extremely hard to get into; others less so.

It is a mixed bag, as you indicated. When I started college in Arkansas in 1987, I'd been afraid of whether I could get in, and how I'd stack up against the other students, who I feared would all be so smart. Uh, yeah. Neither fear panned out. I also noticed there were remedial courses for people who weren't ready for college-level work. I liked our college, but it wasn't nationally known, particularly prestigious, etc...

Even then, I'm talking general admission. I think if someone wanted into the nursing program, that'd be different. I had a family member attend a college in Kentucky several years back; getting in wasn't hard. But if you wanted some specific programs, like to enter a Bachelor's level Dental Hygienist program (or I'm told Physical Therapy), that was competitive.

I liked college quite well; so did some others, some of whom took the scenic (lengthy) route pursuing (one hopes) their degree. I don't want to veer us too far off-topic. I wonder how the 'free' (= paid for by other people) college places deal with some of these issues, but that's for another thread.

Boulder John, got a question...if you had a powerful, influential policy-maker position with DEMA, PADI or whichever organization you think might best address this (within the scuba industry, not President of the U.S. or head of the EPA), what measures would you take? A shift in what goals for diving we try in instill (e.g.: not just pretty coral flower gardens with pretty tropical fish)? A bigger push toward eventual wreck, cave and other 'non-reef' content?

 

[boulderjohn]

Boulder John, got a question...if you had a powerful, influential policy-maker position with DEMA, PADI or whichever organization you think might best address this (within the scuba industry, not President of the U.S. or head of the EPA), what measures would you take? A shift in what goals for diving we try in instill (e.g.: not just pretty coral flower gardens with pretty tropical fish)? A bigger push toward eventual wreck, cave and other 'non-reef' content?

It's a great question, and I wish I had a great answer.

I am not like many posters who assume that the people who are in charge of agencies are drooling idiots who would be locked in asylums were they not leading multi-million dollar corporations. I assume they have been doing all sorts of research to find the best answer to your question. Anything I say after this sentence will be somewhat spontaneous and does not represent a firm commitment to anything.

I have seen marketing surveys that show that if you want to grow the general diving population, the way to do it is NOT through advertising high adventure and diving. People considering scuba in general are not interested in that. They are interested in exploring an undersea realm safely. If they are turned onto the more adventurous side, that can come later. I am a case in point. I was certified with an eye to doing lazy reef dives on occasional tropical vacations. Tech diving and cave diving came much later.

Right now PADI is hugely pushing ocean conservation--it seems like that is all they are putting out at times. I think that is good, although maybe they might be ignoring other things a bit too much as a result.

I think what I would push the most, as I have been doing in this forum for a decade, is push improved OW instruction. Don't get me wrong. I am not one who says that the golden age of scuba instruction was 50 years ago and today sucks. I think that in general, OW instruction today is the best it has ever been. But it could be so much better than it is now, so much better than it has ever been. A dozen years ago I gradually moved to teaching students while neutrally buoyant and in horizontal trim, and I was rewarded by having students leave OW class looking like highly experienced divers. I was so excited I got PADI to publish an article on how to do it. The leaders of the major agencies now know this is true, but they are afraid to pull the trigger. They all encourage it, but they don't require it. They need to.

Why?

When I was still working on my instructor certification, long before I had had my neutral buoyancy epiphany, I was doing a dive in Key Largo, and I saw a woman literally crawling on the sandy ocean floor, grossly overweighted, her eyes pleading for some kind of relief, someone to come and help her end the agony of that dive. I looked into those eyes and told myself that no student of mine would ever look like that. Do you think that diver was having fun? Do you think that diver was excited to take another dive trip? Divers who go into the water with confidence will have fun. They will want to continue. The dive industry needs to do all it can to make that happen.

 

[drrich2]

I have seen marketing surveys that show that if you want to grow the general diving population, the way to do it is NOT through advertising high adventure and diving. People considering that in general are not interested in that. They are interested in exploring an undersea realm safely.

I remember RJP posting about that quite awhile back.

I got into diving for much the same reasons you did, though tech. and cave didn't come into it. When you speak of improving OW instruction, maybe there's another way from the way people often think of it.

The thinking now seems to be make it as quick and cheap as possible, to lower the barrier to entry. Then let people modular chunks (e.g.: Nitrox, AOW, Deep Diver) as needed to round out their dive training needs, like choosing a major in pursuing a college degree. Any 'improvements' (e.g.: combining OW and AOW and Nitrox, adding some Rescue content) are seen as threats to that model - producing better trained divers, but a lot fewer of them.

Here's a thought for an alternative (not replacement). Maybe a course in diving - that includes free diving and scuba, not treating them as separate worlds but part of a set of alternative 'tool boxes' people can use to pursue their diving goals. Free diving is cheaper as it's less gear intensive (disclaimer: I'm not trained in free diving), yes? The message would be 'You can dive without paying a lot of money, or being encumbered like an astronaut gearing up to walk on moon.' Maybe show free diving as a natural extension of a love of snorkeling.

But...when you want to go down and down awhile, it's really not that bad an ordeal to get there, and here's how it's done in case you'd like to.

When I look at a technical diver pictured with a bunch of gas bottles, I am impressed with technical training achievement I imagine it must take to handle all that on a dive...while wondering if any dive could possibly be worth that much hassle. Maybe snorkelers and free-divers look at some recreational divers that way?

Given the number of hunters and fisherman, and the role they often play in nature conservation (e.g.: Ducks Unlimited), perhaps spear fishing should be discussed earlier and publicized more. Not training in the basic OW course, but people shown a clear path to get there.

In other words, try to figure out all the ways a diverse demographic of people who don't necessarily think like we do might use diving. We have one member who dives the Great Lakes and isn't about ocean diving. Some people love diving California and aren't after warm water destinations. And so on.

 

[Esprise Me]

When I was first getting into diving, I ended up chatting with a distant relative who was sort of getting out of diving. He was retired and lived in the Midwest, so his diving happened on tropical vacations. He said he'd begun to realize that you can see pretty much the same stuff snorkeling, but for a lot less money, effort, etc.

I think back on that sometimes, because it's not remotely true with the diving I mostly do. You're not going to see the prickly shark my buddy and I encountered at 90 feet, at night, where the visibility is less than 10 feet near the surface, if you're snorkeling. But I have done a fair amount of snorkeling, even in California (moreso at Catalina than mainland beaches) and it's true you can see a lot of pretty fish without strapping on all that heavy gear. So I'm not sure how tempting those easy, shallow, accessible scuba dives are, since they don't really need to be on scuba. That may be more the problem--not that it takes a lot of work to have any fun, but that it takes a lot of work to have more fun than you could have for less work.

 

[TMHeimer]

A Time Magazine report a couple decades ago said that the Ivy League schools were so well-endowed that they could let all students attend for free, and their endowment would still grow.

Yes, I read online that many students one way or another get a free ride at Harvard, or very low tuition.

 

[lowwall]

Here's a thought for an alternative (not replacement). Maybe a course in diving - that includes free diving and scuba, not treating them as separate worlds but part of a set of alternative 'tool boxes' people can use to pursue their diving goals. Free diving is cheaper as it's less gear intensive (disclaimer: I'm not trained in free diving), yes? The message would be 'You can dive without paying a lot of money, or being encumbered like an astronaut gearing up to walk on moon.' Maybe show free diving as a natural extension of a love of snorkeling.

But...when you want to go down and down awhile, it's really not that bad an ordeal to get there, and here's how it's done in case you'd like to.

When I look at a technical diver pictured with a bunch of gas bottles, I am impressed with technical training achievement I imagine it must take to handle all that on a dive...while wondering if any dive could possibly be worth that much hassle. Maybe snorkelers and free-divers look at some recreational divers that way?

Given the number of hunters and fisherman, and the role they often play in nature conservation (e.g.: Ducks Unlimited), perhaps spear fishing should be discussed earlier and publicized more. Not training in the basic OW course, but people shown a clear path to get there.

This is really funny. What you are suggesting is exactly what scuba was well into the second decade of the sport. The first divers from Cousteau through the early SoCal years were all skin divers first and mostly hunters and shellfish gatherers. The largest change in training from the early days of the sport had nothing to do with scuba skills, instead it was the almost complete abandonment of the swimming/snorkeling/freediving training that originally made up a large part of scuba training.

No one will be surprised that PADI was at the forefront of cutting back on the swimming requirements. It was in 1981 when PADI took the final step of using scuba gear from the first confined water dive.

What allowed this was the evolution of the BCD. Swimming skills were clearly vital when all you had was a weight belt, tank and harness and maybe something you could inflate on the surface in an emergency. But add a BCD with buttons for inflation and deflation and all of a sudden anybody who could handle putting their face in the water was a potential diver. Which meant shops got lots of potential customer for their (PADI) courses, lots of expensive gear sales, and lots of pricey packaged and guided dives.

The problem is that a diver without waterman skills is likely either going to wash out of the sport or only do a small number of dives per year. If you don't keep replacing them, the shops that depends on this model fail. That's exactly what has happened in the US. Although the model works fine in parts of Asia with growing middle classes.

I have no idea how you change this. I'm Gen X and it might be too late to grab many of us who aren't already divers. But maybe selling it as a skill and a new way to explore your local area would have an appeal to the generations after mine. I'm really impressed by the way DRIS is trying to get people into Chicago-area diving, with OW classes taught in drysuits and free drysuit rentals for a period after training and arranging lots of local diving activities.

If you can get people diving locally, cost is much less of an issue. A day of diving becomes just another weekend recreational opportunity instead of a multi-thousand dollar trip that you have to plan your year around. It also strengthens the environmental appeal. It's hard for many of us to ignore the hypocrisy of complaining about coral loss after burning fuel to fly halfway around the world to dive.

 

[ginti]

...

Thanks for the info, I didn't know. But I still do not get your system; it's competitive in a useless way, and it is an obstacle for social mobility. As @wetb4igetinthewater said, 8 countries in Europe offer zero-to-very-low fees. Even other countries offer very low fees compared to US for top tier university (I used to pay 2k€ per year at POLIMI, mechanical engineering, which is ranked 15th in the world at that time by QS, 6th in Europe). Although there can be performance requirement to be admitted, they are not so high - almost anyone has a possibility.

Anyway, put in this way it is so much OT but it's an interesting topic - if you want we can continue on PM.

However, if you consider that young people have to face problems for getting educated, plus problems to find a job with a decent salary, plus they cannot buy a house, plus scuba equipment is expensive - well, it is not OT anymore, in a way...

 

[Searcaigh]

My first exposure to scuba diving was watching Hans and Lotte Hass on black and white TV followed by Jacques Cousteau back in Scotland when we only had two channels. Later I may have seen the occasional Sea Hunt programme, but the former is what caught my interest.

Didn't live near the sea at all and I do recall seeing divers once getting into some rubber boat in Eyemouth off the SE coast of Scotland and thinking that must be a cold thing to do.

Fast forward several years to when I lived in Sligo on the NW coast of Ireland and two of my motorcycle friends were in a dive club, but even they could not entice me into seas around there, although I did join them on a couple of trips, but stayed as dry as you can get in that part of Ireland.

Back in Scotland early 80s I met up with some Australian bikers who worked offshore for COMEX and the next thing I'm doing courses at the Underwater Centre in Fort William and suddenly I'm in "Adventure Land" better than working in a hospital laboratory.

This only lasted for a couple of years, but I found a job in Saudi where it was possible to get to the Red Sea at least once a month rent gear and go diving.

After Gulf War 1 finished I moved to Jeddah and had to do a PADI OW course. My daughter was born a year later and living in a compound with access to a swimming pool made her very comfortable playing in water. We moved to UAE in 97 and with continuous access to pools she became very proficient in water, and did her PADI Junior OW when she was around 10 or 11.

Her studies took over her life and did very little diving until the summer after returning from university in Scotland when I got her a job at a local dive op in Dubai, where she got paid in dive courses (AOW and Rescue) and we did a few trips over the following summers.

When uni finished she went back to working at the dive op and did her DM then became an instructor before heading off to Oz to do her Masters at James Cook Uni in QLD.

She now works for a company that also requires her to dive fairly often and still teaches, which has made me a very proud father. I really don't think she'd have gone down this route if I'd stayed in Scotland to be honest, but who knows. She's not really someone who goes out looking to teach people but she has taught quite a few of her ex-class mates from her school as well as several students from uni.

On top of that she spent several summers working for Operation Wallacea and had fantastic adventures in Indonesia and Fiji teaching kids SCUBA diving, which is great too.

In Dubai there was a schools programme for teaching kids, but I'm not sure how that fared once Covid hit the country.

 

[boulderjohn]

The thinking now seems to be make it as quick and cheap as possible, to lower the barrier to entry. Then let people modular chunks (e.g.: Nitrox, AOW, Deep Diver) as needed to round out their dive training needs, like choosing a major in pursuing a college degree.

There is nothing new here. I was certified nearly a quarter century ago. My class took 2.5 days, and many standards were skipped to make that possible, as I realized much later. I am quite sure the dive operator was doing what it had been doing for many years. The peak of scuba participation world wide was well after that, and many people are arguing that we are still at a world-wide peak.

My cousin learned to dive in the early 1960's by having a sporting goods store salesman explain what it took to be a scuba diver. It took about 5 minutes.

When I look at a technical diver pictured with a bunch of gas bottles, I am impressed with technical training achievement I imagine it must take to handle all that on a dive...while wondering if any dive could possibly be worth that much hassle.

I think there is a major difference between technical divers and the rest of the diving community in this regard. Most divers like it when the dive operator does as much as possible to remove the work of diving. For technical divers, that work is actually part of the fun. I wrote about it here.