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The Great Recession’s missing children are finally bringing college’s financial crisis into sight. Welcome to the ‘enrollment volatility’ era

Universities and colleges across the country have been dealing with a ticking time bomb since the Great Recession, and a growing number of them are saying that it’s about to go off, next semester. A series of announcements over the past month by the highest offices of U.S. universities read like an obituary to a higher learning model that no longer works for either students or the institutions tasked with teaching. And that obituary has been authored in slow motion by the declining birth rate of the last two decades. “Enrollment volatility is widespread, unpredictable and the ‘new normal’ for even strong, well-resourced universities,” J. Michael Haynie, Syracuse University’s chancellor, wrote in a note to faculty and staff last week, announcing the school had missed its undergraduate enrollment target for the next fiscal year. “The fall 2026 enrollment shortfall carries real financial consequences—including a budget deficit, something the University has not experienced in quite some time,” he continued. Many more schools are being forced into similar write-downs as enrollment plummets. In fall 2025, total post-secondary enrollment in the U.S. rose 1% , down from a 4% increase measured the year before, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. At private four-year institutions, enrollment last year dipped 1.6%. A demographic clock determining college-aged student supply started ticking 18 years ago in the wake of the Great Recession, when insecure American households decided to put off having children. But though many university provosts and presidents have pointed to geopolitical and policy factors Baum cautioned against interpreting the enrollment cliff as a cyclical struggle, particularly for smaller schools who are struggling to keep domestic enrollment numbers up anyway. “There’s a decline in the number of high school graduates in this country,” she said. “This is not a surprise. We’ve seen this coming for a long time, but we’re now sort of getting to the point where it’s actually happening.” Researchers have been predicting a demographic cliff for college-aged Americans ever since families started having fewer babies two decades ago, around the time of the Great Recession.