The supply of American high-school graduates continues to shift southward and to the west, but colleges — except for those that have closed altogether — remain where they’ve always been. Many colleges and universities are stuck in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, and many of those institutions are scrambling to identify what they can afford to offer students in the way of program or facility improvements, or both. The seven-campus University of Maine system, for example, will have to contend with a 14-percent decline in the number of high-school graduates through 2032. And the problem is even more acute for many small colleges.
“In general our bricks and mortar were mostly built in the Northeast, moving down to the Southeast,” says Mary B. Marcy, president of Dominican University of California, who wrote an Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges report in 2017 about small-college survival. “To the degree that there is growth in the college-going population, it’s going to be in the Southwest. This is one of the biggest challenges facing small private colleges around the country. And it’s on us right now — many institutions are seeing it this year in enrollment, and it’s projected to continue.”
Smaller institutions typically respond not with fancy amenities but with academic overhauls. Sweet Briar College, rescued by alumnae after it nearly closed in 2015, recently unveiled a new curriculum focused on women’s leadership and contemporary issues like data and sustainability. Hiram College purchased iPads for all its students — and also hiking boots, for a program it’s calling “Tech and Trek.”
According to forecasts by the National Center for Education Statistics, 34 states are expected to have more high-school graduates in 2025-26 than they did in 2012-13. These include a broad band of states from Texas to Washington and Minnesota and another band from Florida to Maryland. New York, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and New Mexico can anticipate more modest increases.
But the New England states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Michigan — all fairly dense with colleges — face declines of 5 percent or more. Populous California is expected to see a lesser decline.
Colleges in the North and East can, of course, try recruiting in the South and West. But many, without big endowments, lack the resources for full-scale recruiting campaigns in parts of the country where they have no name recognition, Marcy says.
“It’s not just the numbers — it’s actually the profile of students that is changing,” she adds. Students graduating from high school now are more diverse — in particular, they’re likelier to be Hispanic — and more likely to come from lower-income and first-generation families. Such students are also more likely to prefer staying close to their families, and less likely to have been raised thinking of a small-college campus as the ideal.
“That pool of students that we traditionally think of as the college-going student,” Marcy says, “is shrinking pretty significantly.”
Nationally, NCES said, the number of high-school graduates increased 22 percent from 2000-1 to 2012-13, growing from 2.8 million to 3.5 million, but is expected to grow more slowly in the years ahead, reaching 3.7 million by 2025-26.
Still, the numbers aren’t all terrible: Between 2000 and 2014, total enrollment in postsecondary institutions rose 32 percent — to 20.2 million, up from 15.3 million, according to the NCES. Enrollment by students age 25 and older increased somewhat faster than that by traditional students, although they still make up most of the market.
Enrollment is projected to increase an additional 15 percent from 2014 to 2025.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
