Standing on shifting sands: Higher education enrollment challenges and strategies to persevere through them

Predicting fall enrollments for U.S. universities and colleges is never easy – and it just got a lot harder.

Many parts of the country are just beginning to feel the impacts of a protracted decline in the size of the high school-leaving population – still a significant source of first-time enrollments. Thanks to Nathan Grawe’s Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, the industry has had time to prepare for or at least digest the news of this massive demographic shift.

There has been substantially less time (none really) to grapple with the fundamental shift in how the U.S. federal government relates to universities and colleges. While sand continues to sift, they will stop moving so rapidly once the Big Beautiful Bill is signed into law later this summer, baking the administration’s higher education policy into the federal budget.

At that point, it is likely that we will see a combination of measures that will introduce significant uncertainty into student enrollments. For example, changes in the extent of and eligibility criteria for Pell Grant funding, and curtailment of federal student loan programs and on-ramps like TRIO and GEAR UP, could dampen demand from low-income students. So would tax increases on endowments – the source of so many scholarships.

Cuts in research funding and reductions in the overhead rates paid on research grants will impact funding for graduate students and likely weaken graduate student demand. So will visa restrictions on international students who contributed six percent (6%) of the total student population and more than a quarter of all graduate students in 2023.

That’s a lot, and to add even greater complexity – we won’t have any certainty until sometime in July (though politics are unpredictable) – as little as four to six weeks before students begin showing up on some campuses to start the fall 2025 semester.