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%. Aggregate enrollment data for next year won’t be available for months, but several schools have already missed their enrollment targets for next fall. 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. With the eldest of that cohort now of college age, schools are having to pay for those decisions taken almost two decades ago. As one university president put it recently, it has left higher education at a “crossroads.” The decline of the liberal arts school Almost every school is struggling, but th