Picture Aurora, a small community in the Finger Lakes region of New York, in 2034. The grass on the old quad at Wells College has been mowed by the locals for 10 summers now. The library, once the pride of Cayuga County, is a shell waiting for a buyer who will not come. The house that used to belong to the college president went on the market in 2027 for less than the price of a Brooklyn parking space. Down the road, in central New York, Cazenovia College is gone. One hundred miles west, Medaille College is gone. Across the state line in Vermont, Goddard College is gone too. In western Pennsylvania, three small Catholic institutions (Cabrini, Rosemont, and Gannon) that once trained the daughters of steelworkers are closed, their properties sold off or acquired by the larger Villanova.
We are well on our way to this gloomy future. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia estimates that 80 additional colleges could close between 2025 and 2029, on top of the more than 300 degree-granting institutions that have been shuttered since 2008. Nathan Grawe, a Carleton College labor economist, has been forecasting a 15 percent drop in the number of 18-year-olds across that same window for nearly a decade. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education is operating under the assumption that the number of high school graduates peaked in 2025 and will continue to decline through 2041. New England, home to six of the seven states with the lowest fertility rates in America, sits on the front line.
In other words, the death of Wells College was the result of long-predicted arithmetic.
When Wells closed in 2024, many students were left with college credits but no credentials. The numbers tell us that many will never receive their degree. A 2023 study from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) found that students from closed colleges are 50 percent less likely to graduate than their peers at operational schools: Roughly half of the 143,215 students in the study, whose colleges closed between 2004 and 2020, transferred; the other half disappeared from the postsecondary system altogether.
The textbook account of higher education access, the one most provosts can recite without notes, says that when one institution disappears, students migrate to the next institution down the road. The data says otherwise, largely because the schools that close are not evenly distributed across the demographic field. In the SHEEO study, the institutions that closed enrolled larger shares of students of color, women, and Pell Grant recipients than those that remained open.
A first-generation student at Wells does not, on receiving the closure email, drive 40 minutes east to Syracuse and matriculate seamlessly. She might have a job at the local diner, a child in pre-K, and a financial aid package that took three appointments and a sympathetic counselor to assemble. Syracuse might be farther than she can manage to commute on a Tuesday night, and the credits she has already earned might not fully transfer with her, if she’s accepted at all. She does not transfer to Syracuse or any other university. She stalls.
Multiply that woman by the 100,000 students the Philadelphia Fed says will face her situation over the second half of this decade. Add to that the 43.1 million adults the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center labels as sitting on some college credits but holding no degree. When colleges close, the country does not just lose capacity to enroll new students, it also loses capacity to recover those we have already failed.
For those schools that survive the tidal wave of closures, conventional wisdom says they will inherit the demand. And indeed, some will. The flagship publics, the well-endowed selective privates, and the regional campuses that happen to sit in growth corridors like Texas, Florida, or the Carolinas will absorb some students. There is now a two-market university system, as the most selective universities (those with acceptance rates under 20 percent) have seen application volume grow for years while regional access institutions—“those colleges with ‘State’ in their name”—and the schools founded by religious orders that educate the children of immigrants have watched their incoming classes shrink. “Across the 12 Penn State commonwealth campuses,” reported a Pennsylvania newspaper, “enrollment has declined by 39% over the last 10 years,” forcing mergers and campus closures. The Cal State system has seen enrollment drop at San Francisco State by 26 percent and at Sonoma State by a whopping 39 percent.
As these schools have lost students, they have coped by replacing tenured faculty with poorly paid adjuncts, and by cutting majors. Sociology goes. Religion goes. Creative writing goes. Foreign languages (other than Spanish) go. The Federal Reserve catalog of “financial exigency” declarations—which, in limited circumstances, allow institutions to fire tenured faculty and close programs—since the pandemic reads like a slow-motion intellectual amputation. What remains is a thinner curriculum, increasingly aligned with what administrators believe the labor market wants this quarter, taught by people without job security to students who can no longer afford to follow curiosity wherever it leads. Higher education survives in this scenario, but as a shadow of itself: a credentialing pipeline rather than a place where 18-year-olds learn to question their own assumptions.
Even schools that admit new students will struggle to do so effectively. State systems that have already shed faculty for a decade would have a difficult time hiring new faculty quickly even if the demographic curve bent and more students showed up. As class sizes balloon, so too do advising loads. The student services that the SHEEO research identified as decisive for closure-displaced students, including records retention, teach-out coordination, and credit articulation, are precisely the first jobs cut when budgets tighten. The institutions still standing will be operating with smaller staffs, in older buildings, with deferred maintenance backlogs that trustees describe in board meetings as “manageable.”
The optimist’s case, whispered in administrative offices or conferences, is that the demographic cliff has a bottom. Birthrates will recover. The college-age population will rebound. Institutions that hang on through the 2020s will be rewarded with a wave of students in the 2030s, and the higher education sector will return to something resembling its old shape.
This is wishful arithmetic. Updated census projections show a brief, modest uptick in 18-year-olds around 2030, on the order of 55,000 additional students, followed by a second contraction that runs at least through 2039. The U.S. fertility rate in 2024 reached a record low, well below “replacement rate,” meaning the number of children per woman needed to maintain a population level from one generation to the next. And birthrates in America show no sign of reversing on a timeline that would help any college trustee staring down a budget.
Demographers have started calling this next contraction the “second cliff,” but the metaphor is misleading: It implies a separate event. In fact, it is the same trend, paused for a decade and resumed. The institutions that close in the late 2020s will not, in other words, simply be reopened in the 2030s by a next, larger cohort. Their physical parts will have been sold, demolished, or repurposed. Their faculty will have retired, found new positions—perhaps in administration at surviving institutions—or left the academy altogether. The expertise that was built up over a century will not be reconstituted in five years because some counties had a baby boom. Instead, the closures represent a permanent contraction of the American educational footprint.
IMPLAN, an economic modeling firm that has tracked the recent wave of closures, estimates that the average four-year college shutdown removes 265 jobs, $14 million in labor income, $21 million in regional GDP, and $32 million in total economic output from its host community. Across the 27 nonprofit campus closures IMPLAN studied between 2022 and 2024, the cumulative damage was 7,200 jobs, $374 million in labor income, $543 million in GDP, and $848 million in total output. On the ground, these figures look like dental practices losing half their patients, pizzerias whose Friday-night business depended on residence hall traffic, property tax bases that no longer support a full-time fire department, and regional theaters that see both their ticket-buying base and their volunteer pool evaporate.
In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported that nearly 277,000 New Englanders are directly employed in higher education, with the sector indirectly supporting another 285,000 jobs across the region. The same dependence holds for upstate New York, central Pennsylvania, downstate Illinois, and the rural counties of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.
These are the counties that already feel left behind. They voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and they might swing right again in 2028, with even better reasons. When a college closes in areas like these, the loss is not only economic. It is the loss of a place where the children of waitresses sat in seminars next to the children of doctors, reading the same novels and arguing about the same passages. It is the loss of a de facto public library or concert hall, a pediatric speech pathology clinic that the university’s education department staffed with student trainees, or the only theater in three counties that staged Shakespeare. The town becomes more like every other former industrial community: a place that used to have something—where the people who could leave have left, and the people who couldn’t are angry about it.
Wells College ran the water treatment plant in Aurora. When the school closed, the village had to figure out how to deliver safe drinking water on its own. That detail, more than any econometric estimate, captures what is being unwound. The American small-town college is infrastructure.
The United States has spent the past 75 years building the biggest and best higher education system in the world. The GI Bill, the California Master Plan, the Higher Education Act of 1965, the community college boom—each of these expanded the share of Americans with some postsecondary credential. By 2025, about 45 percent of the civilian labor force held a bachelor’s degree or higher, up from 31 percent in 2000. And while a 2025 report by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showed that the college wage premium has stagnated, it’s plateaued at a peak: Those with a bachelor’s degree still earn roughly 70 percent more than those without a degree.
Yet politicians who argue that college is a scam, that trades pay better, and that the wage premium is illusory are responding to real shifts. The supply of graduates has risen—as have college costs—and the entry-level jobs that demand a bachelor’s degree are being eroded by technology. None of this means that the country can afford to disinvest in postsecondary education, but rather that the country can no longer rely on the brute force of demographic and degree expansion as a driver of economic growth and upward mobility.
Students from closed colleges are 50 percent less likely to graduate. A 2023 study showed that when a school shuttered, roughly half of its students transferred; the other half disappeared from the postsecondary system altogether.
The competitive consequences are real. The economies the United States competes against in advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence are all working from a higher human capital base than they were a decade ago. South Korea now graduates a higher share of its young adults from postsecondary institutions than the United States does. China graduates more engineers in absolute terms annually than the entire American higher education system enrolls in those fields; Germany invests in apprenticeships that produce skilled workers. None of these countries are seeing colleges close at rates remotely similar to America’s.
The closures, the demographic decline, and the wage-premium plateau combine into a third effect that is already legible in the data: a sharper sorting of opportunity by class and place. Children from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy Plus institution as are middle-class children with comparable test scores, according to research by Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman of Harvard and Brown. The selective end of the system is increasingly becoming a finishing school for the children of the already arrived, while the nonselective end—the part of the system that historically did the work of mobility—is being amputated.
The annual cost of a four-year private college now averages $58,600 a year for tuition, fees, room, and board. At a four-year public, the in-state price tag is $24,920. These are list prices, and most students do not pay list prices, but the gap between published price and discounted price is itself a sorting mechanism that punishes families who are unfamiliar with the financial aid system. The schools that close are disproportionately the ones with the smallest endowments, the smallest discount margins, and the most working-class students. The schools that survive are disproportionately the ones with the largest endowments, the most discount room, and the most affluent students. The result is a higher education sector in which the bottom of the pyramid has been sheared off and the top has consolidated.
Anthony Carnevale, the former director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, has been making this argument for 15 years along with colleagues Peter Schmidt and Jeff Strohl. Their book, The Merit Myth, describes American higher education as a “dual system” in which selective and nonselective institutions function as separate labor markets with distinct rates of return. The closures are forcing the dual system into something simpler and crueler: a single system at the top, a vacuum below. The students whose parents went to Wells will not, in the typical case, end up at Cornell or Penn. They will end up in the labor market with a high school diploma and a politically combustible grievance.
Kevin Carey of New America has spent the last several years arguing in these pages, most recently in this issue, that instead of pushing increasingly complicated and politically doomed plans to forgive student loans after the fact, reformers should try to make college affordable on the front end. His proposal would have the federal government offer a $10,000 per student subsidy to public and nonprofit colleges in exchange for their implementation of a price schedule that charges middle- and lower-income families no or low tuition and higher-income families modest tuition on a sliding scale (up to $10,000 a year, still below what most public college tuition costs today). Participating institutions would form a network that recognizes one another’s credits, easing transfer (and rightfully dismantling a system that currently drains students’ financial aid and devalues their efforts by requiring them to retake courses passed at other accredited institutions). Elite privates could opt out and remain elite privates. But for struggling colleges that serve predominantly working-class students, the program could be a godsend. It would provide a business model that keeps their doors open over the long term while offering students more affordable and higher-quality degrees. The plan, which Carey touted in these pages in 2020, would restore the higher education system that Americans had in the 1960s and ’70s, when working- and middle-class students could attend a state or regional college without taking on a mortgage’s worth of debt.
Carey was right then, and he’s right now. But it’s been six years since he first proposed this plan, and while some of his ideas found their way into the Biden administration’s free community college proposal in the Build Back Better Act, that proposal was scrapped as part of spending cuts demanded by moderate Democrats in the Senate. So, Carey’s proposal hasn’t saved those schools that have closed in the meantime, and it won’t save those now on the brink.
There is a temptation in higher education circles to treat the closures solely as an industry problem. A consolidation. A right-sizing. A market correction long overdue. Inefficient institutions exiting, and the more competitive ones absorbing their share. Trustees and consultants speak this language fluently. It allows them to feel righteous while presiding over the dismantling of their own life’s work.
This framing is a category error. The closures are not merely an industry problem, but a national political event, as well: They are eliminating the precise institutions that historically translated working-class effort into middle-class status, in precisely the regions that have already been hollowed out. They are doing so at a moment in which the college wage premium, while stagnating, still matters—and while the dominant narrative on the right insists that college was a scam all along. Each of these dynamics reinforces the others. The closures lend evidence to the narrative; the narrative lends political cover to further disinvestment; the disinvestment generates further closures. This cycle is already in action.
Carey’s plan is the most cogent attempt to break the cycle that anyone has put forward. It deserves to be the basis of the next Democratic education platform, and it needs to be paired with an honest conversation about what the United States now wants its postsecondary system to do, given that it can no longer expect that system to grow on demographic autopilot. Thus far, the closures aren’t reflected in either party’s 2028 agenda. The Republican coalition is content to let higher education shrink because the system’s graduates vote Democratic; the Democratic coalition has yet to decide whether it values regional access institutions, whose graduates are more moderate than the alumni of the prestigious institutions that staff its campaigns, think tanks, and Capitol Hill offices.
In Aurora, the grass on the old quad will continue to be mowed. The library might become a wedding venue, a county records office, or a Dollar General. The students who would have attended Wells in 2032 might be working at the nearby Amazon facility in East Syracuse. Elsewhere, closures will continue the way Hemingway said bankruptcy unfolds: gradually, then suddenly. And the country will discover, years too late, that the institutions it allowed to die were the ones holding together the lingering scraps of American dreams. might be working at the nearby Amazon facility in East Syracuse. Elsewhere, closures will continue the way Hemingway said bankruptcy unfolds: gradually, then suddenly. And the country will discover, years too late, that the institutions it allowed to die were the ones holding together the lingering scraps of American dreams.
