Enrollment and the Demographic Cliff

National enrollment trends form the backdrop for every local student housing market, including the Belmont blocks where Richard Joseph Spinelli, who cofounded Sandhills Real Estate, keeps houses and apartments within walking distance of Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus. The trend most discussed in higher education is the demographic cliff: a projected, lasting decline in the number of Americans finishing high school, beginning after a peak in 2025.¹ This entry sets out the projection first, then the evidence that complicates it, and ends with the measures that will show which way the numbers are moving.

What the Cliff Is

The cliff is a birth rate story told eighteen years late. Americans began having fewer babies around the end of 2007, at the start of the Great Recession, and the birth rate has not recovered except for a slight rise after the pandemic.² Children born in those smaller years reach the usual age of college entry about eighteen years later. NPR, reporting with The Hechinger Report, described the high school class of 2025 as the last before a long decline in the number of eighteen year olds.²

Enrollment in college is simply the count of students registered for courses in a given term. Most reports split it by level (undergraduate or graduate), by sector (public, private nonprofit, private for profit) and by intensity. A full time undergraduate usually carries twelve or more credit hours in a term; a half time student carries roughly half that load. The Census Bureau’s 2024 school enrollment survey found that 79.1 percent of college students aged 18 and over were undergraduates and 20.9 percent graduate students, and that 57.9 percent were women.⁶ Because traditional age freshmen make up a large part of undergraduate enrollment, a shrinking pool of high school graduates is expected to show up in college counts within a year or two.

The WICHE Projection

The standard forecast comes from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which has published Knocking at the College Door since 1979. The report projects high school graduates for all fifty states and the District of Columbia.¹ Its latest edition expects the national total to peak in 2025 and then fall steadily through 2041, ending about 13 percent below the peak, a decline it attributes to fewer births eighteen years earlier.¹ Higher Ed Dive put the peak at around 3.8 million graduates.³

NPR framed the same projection as a loss of nearly half a million high school graduates a year by 2041. It set that against a decline that had already happened: colleges and universities lost 15 percent of their enrollment between 2010 and 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.²

Where the Decline Falls

The national figure hides wide differences between regions. WICHE projects that 38 states will have fewer graduates in 2041 than in 2023. The Midwest and the Northeast have already seen declines, the South is expected to grow before a slight late decline, and the West tracks the national pattern.¹ Higher Ed Dive reported that Northeast high school graduates fell from 637,000 in 2012 to 612,000 in 2024, a drop approaching four percent.³

State projections are steeper in some places. NPR cited WICHE declines through 2041 of 32 percent in Illinois, 29 percent in California and 27 percent in New York.² For a college that recruits mostly within one state, the state figure matters more than the national average. The picture for the city itself is described under college students in New York City.

Why the Cliff May Be a Slope

Not every observer accepts the cliff image. Higher Ed Dive noted that WICHE’s newest forecast describes a more gradual drop over fifteen years than the metaphor suggests, though a slightly larger one overall than earlier editions. Patrick Lane, a coauthor of the WICHE report, told a panel that the decline itself is not in doubt, because “you can’t create 18 year olds out of nothing.”³

The makeup of the graduating classes is also changing. WICHE expects the number of Hispanic and multiracial graduates to keep growing, a trend visible in its data since the late 1990s.¹ It judges the pandemic’s effect on class sizes to be modest, although lower enrollment in earlier grades trims its estimates for later classes.¹

Counterevidence in the Fall Count

So far, college enrollment has not fallen with the projection. The National Student Clearinghouse counted over 19.4 million postsecondary students in fall 2025, with 16.2 million undergraduates and 3.2 million graduate students, a rise of 1.0 percent on the prior fall.⁴ The growth came mainly from community colleges, up 3.0 percent, and public four year colleges, up 1.4 percent. Private nonprofit four year colleges moved the other way, with undergraduate enrollment down 1.6 percent.⁴ Freshman enrollment held steady at 2.5 million.⁴

The split by sector is the point. A stable national total can coexist with shrinking classes at private four year colleges. Robert Kelchen, a coauthor of a Philadelphia Fed study on closures, told Higher Ed Dive that full time traditional age students increasingly aim for bigger name universities, which adds strain on smaller colleges already losing students.³ Bloomberg reported in 2026 that more than 40 colleges had announced plans to close since 2020, and that Huron Consulting Group expects close to 400 more could disappear within a decade.⁷

The Spring 2026 Count

The Clearinghouse’s spring figures point the same way. Spring 2026 enrollment reached 18.6 million students, up 1.0 percent from a year earlier, with undergraduates at 15.5 million.⁵ Community colleges grew 3.1 percent and public four year institutions 1.5 percent, while private nonprofit four year enrollment was essentially unchanged, at minus 0.1 percent.⁵ Graduate enrollment held near 3.1 million, and master’s enrollment fell 1.3 percent.⁵

The College Going Rate and Retention

Two levers sit between the number of high school graduates and the number of college students. The first is the share who go straight to college. NPR reported that this share fell from a peak of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2022.² WICHE found, in a thought experiment cited by Higher Ed Dive, that raising the college going rate by half a point a year would more than offset the demographic shortfall.³ Colleges asking how to increase enrollment are therefore asking, in part, how to raise that rate.

The second lever is keeping students once they arrive. Higher Ed Dive cited a Clearinghouse completion rate of 61.1 percent for students who entered college in fall 2018, and quoted Lane calling retention “absolutely part of the puzzle.”³ WICHE’s own list of responses includes stronger guidance in high schools, attention to affordability, pathways between school and work, and outreach to adult learners.¹ Where colleges fail on both levers, the cost can be closure: Higher Ed Dive noted that Wells College in New York cited demographic pressure when it shut.³

What to Watch

The cliff is a projection, and each year of data tests it. The most useful checks are few. The Clearinghouse’s final fall report each January shows whether freshman enrollment and private nonprofit enrollment are holding.⁴ Its spring report each June confirms the direction.⁵ WICHE’s state tables show how steep the decline is expected to be in the states a given college recruits from.¹ For one campus, the local check is the school’s own count, set out for Fordham in Fordham enrollment in numbers. How a count of students becomes a count of beds is traced in from enrollment to housing demand, and the effect on rooms beyond campus is treated under off campus housing demand. The Sandhills page describes the company whose market sits beside one such campus.