Article URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/college-enrollment-demographic-cliff/686750/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47756672 Points: 6 # Comments: 0

After many decades of democratization, higher education could once again become a luxury good.

The “demographic cliff” is upon us.

The number of teenagers graduating from American high schools peaked last year.

It will begin declining this spring and keep falling steadily through at least 2041.

The trend is more of a downward slope than an abrupt falloff, but the gradient is steep and represents a crisis to colleges dependent on filling classroom seats and dorm beds.

The United States currently has about 4,000 colleges.

According to a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, about 60 are closing on average each year; that number could double in any given year if the bottom falls out of enrollment.

Over the past half century, as more teenagers have enrolled in higher education, what was once mostly a local business has become national, especially for top students, whose sense of distance has gradually shifted.

Campuses that once felt far away now seem closer, thanks first to interstate highways, then to discount airlines, and then to technology.

Parents in the 1980s might have talked to their college kid on a dorm-floor pay phone once every few weeks, if they were lucky.

Today’s parents can text and FaceTime their kids multiple times a day.

Rose Horowitch: The Harvard of the South … of the West?

As they lost more and more local students to national universities, regional colleges found ways to stay afloat.

They expanded access for underrepresented groups, added programs and amenities to attract students who might have skipped college otherwise, and partnered with the private sector to reach new markets online and internationally.

For a long time, they could count on finding enough teenagers to fill their freshman class.

That era is over.

Undergraduate enrollment nationwide has mostly been falling since 2011, even before the demographic cliff.

Now, with fewer 18-year-olds in the pipeline, the enrollment machine at local and regional campuses is running out of fuel.

If you overlay a map of where colleges are located with projections of high-school graduates, you’ll notice an immediate disconnect with supply and demand.

The Northeast and the Midwest have the highest density of college campuses but will also see some of the biggest declines in the number of high-school graduates by the 2040s.

In all, 38 states are projected to see a drop in the number of graduates.

Only 10, most of them in the South, will experience growth.

In 2022, Pennsylvania merged six schools in the 14-campus Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education into two new institutions.

“We were built and operating as if we still had 120,000 students, when in reality we only had 85,000,” Daniel Greenstein, the former chancellor of the system who oversaw the merger, told me.

The merger preserved some physical presence, but at a cost, Greenstein said.

Students who wanted to be on a campus could be, but many advanced courses with small enrollments and specialized faculty would be offered solely online.

Such hybrid options might work for some place-bound teenagers, but online courses aren’t a replacement for most teenagers right out of high school.

“If you’re an 18-year-old and can’t go the traditional route, you’re probably not going to choose a degree program of any kind,” Michael Koppenheffer, a vice president at EAB, an enrollment consulting firm, told me.

Only about 16 percent of undergraduates ages 15 to 23 took classes for their entire degree fully online in 2019–20, the most recent numbers available from the Department of Education.

At the high school that I graduated from, in northeastern Pennsylvania, about 55 percent of graduates now go on to college.

But the options around them have narrowed considerably since my childhood.

The nearby Penn State campus is set to shut down in 2027, one of seven the university is closing around the state because of falling enrollment.

Several neighboring private colleges also face financial challenges as they attract fewer students.

When enrollment falls, campuses shut down.

And when campuses disappear, enrollment falls further, because the local students most likely to attend those institutions lose a nearby option.

A vicious cycle emerges, and the worry is that the demographic cliff combined with campus closures will drive the number of college-going students only further downward.

“When you close the campus, you lose the students who would have gone there,” Hillman said.