This is the big risk lurking behind recent college closures
Matt Zalaznick
October 24, 2024
Closures are surging but at a lower rate than in the more turbulent years just before the COVID pandemic.
College closures get a lot of attention but they may be having an outsize impact on the psyche of higher ed. A new analysis of the so-called enrollment cliff finds most colleges are “at no risk of closing” but face a far more realistic threat.
Closures are surging but at a lower rate than in the more turbulent years just before the COVID pandemic, according to the Brookings Institution report. In 2018, 236 colleges closed compared to 32 in 2020 and 99 in 2023. For-profit institutions accounted for large majorities of the closures in all three of those years—for instance, 17 four-year nonprofits shut down last year.
Notably, the four-year nonprofits that closed in 2023 were “very small,” enrolling an average of 123 students. “Nationwide, ‘only’ a few thousand students were affected,” writes Dick Startz, the report’s author and a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Since there are something like 11 million four-year college students, we’re talking about closures affecting fewer than one in a thousand students.”
