Closures are Decimating Higher Ed. But Your Campus Needn’t Succumb
Rob Jenkins
September 23, 2024
Since March 2020, at least 64 colleges—mostly small, private liberal arts schools—have either closed or announced they will be closing, affecting almost 46,000 students.
This follows a decade that saw nearly 900 colleges shut their doors. Most of those, however, were for-profit institutions, as the Obama Administration cracked down on such schools for allegedly bilking their students, not to mention the federal government, out of financial aid funds.
This latest round of closures feels different. It primarily affects traditional not-for-profit institutions and even includes some public campuses, raising a number of questions: Why is this happening? What might be the long-term consequences? And what can at-risk colleges do to protect themselves?
The “why” has to do mostly with shrinking enrollments. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, from 2012 and 2019, college enrollment nationwide fell by more than 10 percent, due in large part to a four percent drop in the birthrate from 1990 to 2001. This demographic trend will only worsen, as the birthrate declined even more sharply following the Great Recession in 2008.
