The numbers have been on the wall for years — penciled in, really, by parents who stopped having children during the Great Recession. Those babies who weren’t born in 2008 and 2009 are now the 18-year-olds who aren't showing up on college campuses in 2026. And the pipeline will keep thinning.
The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education has projected that the number of U.S. high school graduates peaked somewhere between 3.8 and 3.9 million in 2025 and is now in sustained decline, a drop of roughly 13 percent expected by 2041.
Dr. Nathan Grawe, the Carleton College economist who spent years trying to sound the alarm in his 2018 book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, projected a 15 percent contraction in the traditional college-age population between 2025 and 2029 alone. The cliff, it turns out, was not a metaphor. It is a ledge, and institutions are going over it in real time.
This year, eight institutions have either closed or announced they will cease operations before year-end. Hampshire College in Massachusetts, whose enrollment had fallen from roughly 842 students in fall 2024 to just 625 by fall 2025 — less than half of what it enrolled in the early 2000s — announced in April that its fall 2026 semester would be its last. Anna Maria College, also in Massachusetts, followed days later. Trinity Christian College near Chicago cited what its acting president called “significant and rapidly evolving financial challenges” and “no sustainable path forward.” Siena Heights University in Michigan, where enrollment had fallen between 30 and 70 percent over a decade, announced its closure for June 2026. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has modeled that as many as 80 more institutions could shut down within five years.
The schools dying share a profile as recognizable as a cautionary tale: small enrollments under 2,000 students, heavy dependence on tuition revenue, negligible endowments, and locations in the rural Northeast and Midwest—regions that are themselves losing population. They built their business models on the assumption that 18-year-olds would keep coming. They didn't build anything else.
The irony of the enrollment cliff is that the students exist. There are, by most estimates, more than 36 million Americans who have some college experience but no credential. There are millions more working adults who have never set foot on a campus but who need skills, credentials, or degrees to advance in careers that are changing faster than they can track. The question is not whether these students are out there. The question, according to experts, is whether colleges are designed to serve them — and most, frankly, are not.
The institutions that have cracked the code tend to share certain characteristics: they stopped treating adult learners as an afterthought and started treating them as the primary market. Western Governors University, a nonprofit online institution built specifically around competency-based education, allows students to move at their own pace and charges flat-rate tuition per six-month term regardless of how many courses a student completes. Southern New Hampshire University's “College for America” program takes a project-based, skills-aligned approach explicitly tied to workforce outcomes. Purdue Global has built employer partnerships into its core strategy, offering tailored education pipelines for companies in cybersecurity, nursing, financial services, and other fields.
And then there is National University, perhaps the most instructive case study of an institution that was ahead of the curve before the curve had a name.
Founded in San Diego in 1971 by a Navy veteran, National University was built from its first year around the students traditional colleges were not designed to serve: working adults, military personnel, caregivers, career-changers. It now enrolls 130,000 learners a year — 50,000 degree-seeking students and 80,000 in workforce and professional development.
Experts note that National University’s recent memorandum of understanding with the South Orange County Community College District illustrates the kind of structural strategy that separates institutions with a plan from those without one. Under the agreement, students from Irvine Valley College and Saddleback College gain access to defined transfer pathways, dedicated advising, and a tiered tuition reduction framework: a 46 percent reduction for students who complete an Associate Degree for Transfer and enroll within 36 months; 25 percent for those completing an Associate of Arts or Science within the same window; and 15 percent for recent alumni within five years. The discounts extend to employees of both colleges and their families.
For the community colleges, the appeal is equally practical.
“Our students come to Irvine Valley College with clear goals and a strong commitment to their education,” said Dr. Martha McDonald, the college’s vice president of student services.
“Partnerships like this one strengthen the advising, guidance, and support students receive as they plan their next steps."
"Students should not have to navigate unnecessary complexity to keep moving forward,” said Dr. Gerardo de los Santos, National University's vice president of community college relations. “This partnership is about creating continuity, honoring students' academic progress, and making sure the transition feels supported and achievable.”
What makes this model significant is not any single element — tuition discounts exist everywhere — but the combination: predictable pathways, locked-in pricing tied to academic milestones, and outreach infrastructure that meets students at the community college rather than waiting for them to arrive independently. National University is also building on a statewide partnership with the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, suggesting a deliberate strategy of scale rather than one-off deals.
These models share a basic insight: adult learners don't want to rearrange their lives around a campus. They want the campus — or its digital equivalent — to rearrange itself around their lives.
The regional comprehensives and community colleges navigating the cliff most successfully tend to be doing several things simultaneously. They are widening the front door: redesigning websites, financial aid communications, and admissions processes to remove the friction that stops working adults before they start. They are building flexible delivery infrastructure — online, hybrid, accelerated, self-paced — not as a pandemic accommodation but as a permanent institutional commitment. And they are pursuing partnerships with employers, workforce boards, and community organizations to reach prospective students where they already are, rather than waiting for them to show up at an admissions office.
Missouri is developing coordinated technical assistance for institutions participating in the state's adult re-enrollment initiative. North Carolina community colleges have developed detailed adult learner guidebooks. New America’s recent research on three community colleges that have successfully grown adult enrollment identifies proactive outreach, reduced administrative barriers, and dedicated support services as the common denominators.
Iris Palmer, director of community colleges at New America—a nonpartisan think tank—argues that states need to go further and be more specific. She points to last-dollar financial aid programs targeting adults 25 and older, competitive grants that give institutions flexibility to tailor approaches to their own communities, and designated navigator and coach roles at each participating institution to guide adult learners from re-admission through completion.
“Place advisors at satellite and smaller campuses where adult students are more likely to study,”she told The EDU Ledger. She added that statewide marketing campaigns — texting, mailers, social media, broadcast — with consistent messaging can also reduce the burden on individual colleges that lack the resources to run their own outreach operations.
ReUp Education, which works with colleges to re-engage stopped-out students, reports that one in three learners it contacts chooses to re-enroll, a striking figure given that these are people who had already walked away from higher education once.
At the federal level, Palmer identifies two pressure points where reform would have outsized impact. The first is the cost of attendance calculation, which governs how much aid students can receive. She argues that Congress should require institutions to base their living-expense components on consistent, data-driven benchmarks — drawing on federal microdata and regional cost-of-living indices from HUD, USDA, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics — rather than internal assumptions that often underestimate what adult learners actually spend. The second is Satisfactory Academic Progress, or SAP, the federal requirement that students maintain minimum grade point averages and completion rates to remain eligible for financial aid. Palmer argues that allowing students to reset their SAP status after two years away from enrollment would meaningfully expand access for adults who struggled academically earlier in life, left under difficult circumstances, and are now prepared to return.
“A reset would allow students to take a break, return better prepared, or, after an emergency, have a better chance of completing their degree,”she said. Indiana has already implemented a similar reset for its state grant program. The Pell Grant Preservation and Expansion Act includes a comparable provision at the federal level.
Enrollment in online e-learning programs, driven heavily by adult learners, is expected to reach $400 billion globally by 2026. Experts point out that the institutions capturing those students are not always the ones that have been around the longest or carry the most prestigious names.
The institutions that are not adapting tend to fall into recognizable patterns. Some are in denial, assuming that their particular student population is somehow insulated from the trend. Some are making incremental adjustments — adding an online section here, a recruitment brochure there — without restructuring the underlying model. And some, facing cascading financial pressures, have simply run out of runway to attempt transformation at all.
Palmer contends that states have both the responsibility and the tools to manage this transition more deliberately, but that most have not used them. She points to Pennsylvania's specialization of its regional campuses, Georgia's support for system mergers, and Connecticut's community college reform as examples of proactive state stewardship.
“It is better for states to be aware of the health of their public colleges and support the connections that will make them stronger than to allow the colleges to get so weak that they collapse,” she said. The challenge is harder with private institutions, where states have limited visibility into financial operations and fewer levers to pull before a closure becomes a crisis.
The equity stakes of institutional failure are not abstract. Palmer is direct about who absorbs the losses when a college closes or a program disappears.
“Colleges forced to merge or close tend to be those that serve more marginalized learners,” she said. The policy obligation, in her view, is clear: if a college closes, states and the federal government should ensure those students are connected to other pathways for completing their programs. If a program is eliminated in a merger, students should be connected to opportunities that mirror their original goals. She added that without that active intervention, the demographic cliff becomes something else — not just an enrollment problem, but a broken promise to students.
