Rob Bryan

The college enrollment cliff is no longer a forecast. It is happening right now, and the damage is showing up everywhere: Clemson is $1.5 billion in debt. Syracuse just eliminated 93 academic programs, 55 of which had zero students enrolled. UNC-Chapel Hill is cutting $89 million over three years. Duke let 600 employees go in a $350 million budget reduction. Indiana's higher education commission voted to eliminate or merge 580 degree programs across all public universities. The University of Vermont is projecting a 15% drop in its freshman class. Vermont alone has had five college closures in the last three years. These are not small schools nobody has heard of. These are flagship state universities and elite private institutions. The projections are brutal. High school graduates peaked at roughly 3.9 million in 2025 and will now decline steadily through 2041. A 15% drop in college-age students is expected by 2029. A worst-case scenario from a December 2024 study projects up to 80 additional college closures per year through 2029. Since 2020, more than 48 public and private colleges have already shut down. US births peaked at 4.3 million in 2007. The birth rate dropped 4% between 2007 and 2009 and never recovered. 2026 is 18 years later. The baby bust generation just hit college age, and there are not enough of them to fill America's universities. The American university system was built for a population that no longer exists. Tuition kept rising while the number of 18-year-olds started falling. The endowments of Harvard and Stanford will be fine. Everyone else is fighting over a shrinking pie with a cost structure designed for a world where 4.3 million babies were born every year. That world ended in 2007. The bill just came due.