Glut of colleges, causing closures from lack of students

Trinity Christian College, Siena Heights University and Sterling College couldn’t pull through.

In 2025, they succumbed to a fundamental problem killing colleges across the US: not enough students. The schools will award their final degrees this spring, stranding students not yet ready to graduate and forcing faculty and staff to hunt for new jobs.

David Bergh knows this pain all too well. He was the final president of Cazenovia College, which held its last, bittersweet graduation ceremony in 2023. Tucked in a small upstate New York town, Cazenovia survived the Civil War and the Great Depression but couldn’t overcome the one-two punch of falling enrollment and the Covid-19 pandemic. The school shuttered just shy of its bicentennial.

“Closing Cazenovia was an incredibly heartbreaking experience. It was torturous,” Bergh said. “And unfortunately, there will be more of it.”

The country’s tumbling birth rate is pushing schools toward a “demographic cliff,” where a steadily dropping population of people in their late teens and early 20s will leave desks and classrooms empty. Many smaller, lesser-known schools like Cazenovia have already hit the precipice. They’re firing professors, paring back liberal arts courses in favor of STEM — or closing altogether.

Pennsylvania State University, citing falling enrollment at many of its regional branches, plans to shutter seven of its 20 branch campuses after the spring 2027 semester.

Penn State’s decision highlights a challenge that many school administrators are loath to admit: There are a lot of colleges. And campuses in far-flung places, without brand recognition, are falling out of favor with students already questioning the value of a college degree. For example, while Penn State’s flagship University Park campus saw enrollment grow 5% from 2014 to 2024, 12 other Penn State campuses recorded a 35% drop, according to a report tasked with determining whether closures were necessary.

Although it has plunged since the 1950s, the US birth rate ticked upward slightly before the 2008 financial crisis, and that brief demographic boost has kept enrollment at larger schools afloat. But the nationwide pool of college-aged Americans is expected to shrink after 2025. Schools face the risk that each incoming class could be smaller than the last. The financial pressure will be relentless.

Since 2020, more than 40 schools have announced plans to close, displacing students and faculty and leaving host towns without a key economic engine. Trinity Christian College, a private institution outside of Chicago, announced in November it would shutter, driven in part by enrollment that dropped 18% from 2019 through 2024. Close to 400 schools could vanish in the coming decade, according to Huron Consulting Group. The projected closures and mergers will impact around 600,000 students and redistribute about $18 billion in endowment funds, Huron estimates.


more at Bloomberg - college enrollment falling off a cliff (may be paywalled)