The Enrollment Cliff Is Here. Which Schools Will Survive It?

Illustration by Fortunate Joaquin Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story. This is Part 3 in a series of columns about the viability of the American university system.This series on the future of higher education started with a simple question: Should I still be contributing to my children’s college funds? My first attempt to answer that question centered on the growing disillusionment with higher education in general. Then, in Part 2, I talked to a professor and former dean who believes that A.I. will force the academy to make a lot of difficult choices which may upend the four-year model of college, and leave us with a landscape of nimbler, bespoke institutions that will have to constantly prove their worth. This week, I want to look at something less speculative but perhaps even more doomer-ish: If my kid does want to attend college in 2035, how many schools will she actually have to choose from?

A couple weeks ago, I spent a few hours at Merritt College, in Oakland, California. The campus, which spreads out across a heavily wooded part of the hills, was in light disrepair. Nothing apocalyptic, and definitely not blight, but the sort of wear that suggests budget cuts for the grounds crew: patches of unruly grass, cracks in the sidewalk. This campus is relatively new; in the early nineteen-seventies, Merritt moved to this site from its former campus in North Oakland where, famously, two students named Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton met; they later founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Today, Merritt, like many colleges in the East Bay, is facing an extended decline in full-time student enrollment, which, in turn, has led to cutbacks. Last year, the chancellor of the Peralta Community College District, a network of four schools that includes Merritt, proposed a merger with nearby Laney College to create something called Oakland City College.

Roughly a mile away as the crow flies is the site of what once was known as Mills College, which was a private, four-year liberal-arts college for women. In 2022, Mills merged with Northeastern University, in Boston, and became Mills College at Northeastern University, a name that doesn’t make much sense, at least if you care about geography. Mills and Merritt are hardly alone. Last year, at least sixteen nonprofit colleges and universities announced that they would close and seven more announced that they would merge with or be acquired by other schools. Most of the schools that have shut down are, like Mills, small, private institutions. But, during the next decade, there will be a steady drop in the number of this nation’s eighteen-year-olds, which will almost certainly lead to a spike in college closures and mergers throughout the country, not only at small private schools with less-than-élite academic reputations but also at large regional public schools.