About that enrollment cliff
Judd Shapiro, Clearing College Bound Counseling
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece last month under the headline “America’s Colleges Are Hurtling Toward an Enrollment Cliff.” The subhead asked the question every parent of a junior wants answered: will the shrinking number of 18-year-olds finally make admissions easier? The Journal’s own answer was four words long. Depends where you go.
I have been asked some version of this question at nearly every family meeting since the article came out, so let me lay out what the reporting says and then tell you what I think it means for the students I actually work with.
What the Journal reported
The numbers are not in dispute. Americans had fewer babies after the 2008 recession, and those children are now finishing high school. The largest single-year birth cohort in our history showed up on campuses in the fall of 2025. From here the pipeline narrows. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which is the source everyone in this business uses, projects that college enrollment will fall about 13 percent by 2041. In the Midwest and the Northeast the decline is not a forecast. It has already started.
The Journal’s reporters were careful about one thing, and it is the thing that matters. The pain will not be evenly distributed. Colleges that draw from their own region, that depend on tuition to keep the lights on, and that have no meaningful endowment to fall back on are the ones staring over the edge. Colleges with national and international applicant pools, big endowments, and long waiting lists are not.
It is real, and it is not going to save anyone’s application
I want to be clear that I believe the cliff is coming. Demographics are the one prediction in higher education you can take to the bank, because the students who will apply in 2035 have already been born and counted. Anyone telling you the decline is overblown is selling something.
But here is where I part company with the hopeful reading of the story. This change will have almost no effect on the students in high school right now, and it will have no effect at all at the schools where admissions are already competitive.
Think about the arithmetic from the other side of the desk. A school that admits ten percent of its applicants could lose a quarter of the country’s 18-year-olds and still turn away the vast majority of the people who apply. Those schools have been oversubscribed by a factor of five, ten, twenty for a generation. A demographic dip that plays out over fifteen years does not touch that math. If anything, the selective schools are widening their reach, recruiting harder abroad and in the growing states of the South and the Mountain West, precisely so they never have to feel the cliff.
And the timeline does not help a current junior or senior either. The steep part of the decline arrives in the 2030s. A student who is a sophomore today will be out of college before the numbers move in any way an admissions office would notice.
The part nobody wants to say out loud
There is a second half to this story that I think the coverage has been too polite about. Fewer students does not automatically mean easier admissions, because the number of seats is going to fall too.
Small schools and schools without major endowments are going to close, and I expect them to close at a rapid rate. More than forty nonprofit colleges have announced closures since 2020, and the pace has picked up this year. The institutions most at risk are exactly the ones the optimists are counting on to absorb the overflow: tuition-dependent private colleges under two thousand students, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, with thin margins and nothing in the bank. Some will merge. Many will simply shut the doors and send their students scrambling for transfer credits.
When those schools disappear, their students and their applicants do not vanish. They move up the ladder to the schools that remain. So the survivors, the regional flagships, the well-endowed privates, the schools with a real brand, will see applicant pools that hold steady or grow even as the national count of 18-year-olds drops. Admissions at the remaining schools will stay difficult. At the top it may get harder.
What this means for your family
Do not build a strategy around the cliff. I have watched families talk themselves into a reach school on the theory that the odds are about to improve. They are not, at least not for anyone reading this with a child in high school.
Do pay attention to financial health when you build a list. This is the one practical thing the cliff changes right now. If a college on your list is cutting majors, laying off faculty, or discounting tuition so aggressively that the sticker price has become fiction, ask hard questions before you send a deposit. A degree from a school that no longer exists is a real problem, and it is a problem that is going to become more common.
And keep doing what has always worked. Choose schools that fit the student rather than the ranking. Write an application that sounds like a person. Apply to a balanced list. The landscape underneath higher education is shifting, and in ten years it will look different than it does today. The way a seventeen-year-old gets into a good college has not changed, and I do not expect the cliff to change it.
If you would like to talk through what this means for your own student, I am always glad to spend thirty minutes doing exactly that.