A fall in student numbers driven by lower birth rates is a far greater risk to the US higher education sector in the long term than the pressing threats posed by the Trump administration, scholars said.
The largest number of births in US history was recorded in 2007, which means that 2025 is the year that an “enrolment cliff” is expected to begin.
Michael Nietzel, former president of Missouri State University, told Times Higher Education that the effects of the demographic cliff edge may be seen in the next admission cycle.
While “premier name-brand” institutions have rebounded well since the pandemic, Nietzel warned that problems seen in small liberal arts colleges, regional universities and small private universities were likely to accelerate.
“Long term, it’s going to result in an increased rate of colleges having to cut back significantly on their operations, look for mergers or close,” he said.
The North-east and Midwest regions are already experiencing population decline and the number of traditional college-age students will decrease even further by the late 2020s, according to Peter Ghazarian, associate professor of higher education leadership at State University of New York Oswego.
The US sector is already facing a number of challenges this year from the Trump White House. The president has launched unprecedented executive orders affecting research, a crackdown on diversity initiatives, and begun his campaign to close the Department of Education.
For Ghazarian, the enrolment cliff represents a “far more fundamental and long-term threat”.
“Policy changes represent storms in the voyage – the enrolment cliff is a matter of the sea level falling and ships getting trapped and running aground,” he explained.
“The decline in college-age students is not a temporary policy issue; it is a demographic reality that institutions must confront over the next several decades.”
And Ghazarian warned that short-term policy decisions could exacerbate the impact of the demographic cliff.
“Isolationist immigration policies and continued political attacks on higher education could deepen the crisis by diminishing public trust and interest in higher education,” he said.
Nietzel said the prospect of Trump’s “ridicule” of the sector, combined with the enrolment cliff, represented a “double whammy” for universities.
“I think it’s going to be very stormy weather for higher ed for the next four years.
“I worry about that quite a bit, that the damage that’s quickly piling up will be very hard to undo and correct over the next several years, even after Trump is out of office.”
Nathan Grawe, professor of economics at Carleton College, said recent negative trends in college matriculation rates “add to the headwind”.
However, Grawe, whose book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education brought the idea of the enrolment cliff into mainstream higher education discourse, said the challenge had arrived gradually, which gave universities an opportunity to save themselves.
“That makes it possible to imagine many institutions making incremental changes to recruitment and retention practices that offset a good bit of the coming decline,” he said.
The US is not alone in experiencing such demographic change, with higher education in South Korea and Japan dealing with this same phenomenon. There, rural and less prestigious institutions were the first to close or merge.
The US cannot copy their approaches because of its unique higher education landscape, but Ghazarian said there were important lessons to be learned – including actively facilitating mergers which can allow institutions to maintain their missions while sharing resources.
“Ultimately, the institutions that survive the enrolment cliff will be those that adapt their models to reflect the changing demographics of the student population,” he said.
Even though they are now the majority across many institutions, Terrell Dunn, chief strategist at D2 Strategies consulting firm and a former assistant secretary of education, saw a potential solution in focusing on non-traditional students.
These students have significantly different needs from those of traditional students, but most institutions are still not built to support them, according to Dunn.
She said universities needed to provide increased flexibility, along with more clear and direct links to employment.
“These are people who have jobs, families, etc, so they are not on campus 100 per cent of the time.
“Stop designing programmes for students whose only ‘job’ is going to school. If institutions are responsive to the needs of this population, they will attract them.”
However, Nietzel said it was unlikely that boosts from non-traditional students would offset shrinking numbers of seniors graduating from high school and that universities must be prepared to downsize.
“It’s going to take some trimming of budgets and some downsizing of universities, probably fewer academic programmes, certainly fewer staff for them to survive this period.”
