"Enrollment cliff" looms
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The number of U.S. high school graduates is expected to peak in 2025 or 2026 and then decline for years to come — posing severe challenges to schools at all levels.
Why it matters: Schools and colleges are closing, faculty members are being laid off, and districts are facing financial dilemmas — all as education is under political fire from every side.
Driving the news: Due to a birthrate drop after the 2008 recession, schools are planning for a decadelong dry spell that's being referred to as the "enrollment cliff" or "demographic cliff."
- Colleges — primarily small liberal arts schools in the Midwest, Northeast and California — are closing, and others are giving notice to faculty.
- K-12 schools — mostly in cities that lost population during the COVID-19 pandemic — are doing the same.
- Districts are cutting budgets and making tough choices as they plan for lower per-pupil financial allocations: Does tutoring get the axe? Sports? After-school activities?
What they're saying: "I think folks are getting a sense of the ramifications at this point," says Patrick Lane, VP of policy analysis and research at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE).
- "The elementary schools are already living it — they're seeing smaller K-12 classes."
By the numbers: The U.S. is expected to reach "peak high school graduate" in 2025, when around 3.9 million young people will graduate, per WICHE.
Zoom out: There's a simultaneous "financial cliff" as K-12 schools brace for pandemic-era relief money to expire this September.
- Colleges are suffering from the Department of Education's FAFSA snafu — which delayed financial aid offers — as well as declining public trust in higher education.
- Campus protests — and the fall of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania — have contributed to skepticism about the value of pricey degrees.
Between the lines: This isn't the first time the number of school-age children has dropped — but prior dips dovetailed with an increase in high school graduation and college attendance.
- That's because more people saw the value of educational attainment, as Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
- By contrast, Americans' confidence in higher education fell to 36% in 2023 — much lower than in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%), per Gallup polling.
Where it stands: Since the pandemic, "there has not been a rebound in public school enrollment," Thomas Dee, an economist and professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, tells Axios.
- He documented an enrollment decline of 1.1 million students — or 2% — nationally in K-12 public schools in the first full school year after the onset of the pandemic.
- A third of that was in kindergarten alone.
"Parents were confronted with putting a kindergartener or first-grade student in front of the laptop all day," Dee says.
- At the K-12 level, the continued rise of homeschooling and chronic absenteeism are playing a role too.
Risk factor: Colleges, meanwhile, are announcing closings at a rate of one a week, per the Hechinger Report — and others are in big financial trouble.
- Some are trying to combat the "enrollment cliff" by recruiting nontraditional students — adults with jobs and families, for instance.
- They're also beefing up their "distance learning" options — i.e. Zoom classes.
Reality check: A shrinking candidate pool may make it easier for your kid to get into less competitive schools, but it's not going to be their ticket to the Ivies.
