School’s Out

This article appears in the August 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

When Olivia Montagno entered college as a freshman in 2018, she intended to major in biology. But by her second semester, she felt drawn instead to the music that had been part of her life since she started studying trumpet at age 8. So she decided to take up music education, with the plan of becoming a music teacher.

By her junior year, that was in jeopardy. The College of Saint Rose, her Catholic liberal arts school in Albany, New York, was facing an $11.3 million budget deficit. And the music department was on the chopping block.

The college cut 22 degree programs that year, which served about 10 percent of undergraduates. More than one-fifth of full-time tenured and tenure-track positions were eliminated.

Now, four years later, the College of Saint Rose has closed its doors for good. It had lost 20 percent of its undergraduate enrollment in the 2010s, according to federal data.

“There was a lot of resentment. There was a lot of anger,” Montagno said. “There was a lot of sadness.”

Ninety-five private, nonprofit four-year colleges closed between the 2015 and 2022 academic years.

Montagno was able to graduate, and started a master’s in music performance at the State University of New York at Potsdam. But soon after, she had déjà vu. Potsdam announced in 2023 that it would be ending her program, along with eight others, in the hopes of covering a $9 million budget shortfall.

“I felt really insecure about going out into the world and trying to be a teacher,” said Montagno, who now teaches music in New York. “I contemplated going back for a doctorate, but at this point it doesn’t seem like a good idea because everything either shuts down or closes.”

It’s a story that has become more and more common across higher education in recent years: Programs, often in the arts, humanities, languages, and social sciences, are shuttered; faculty and staff lose their jobs; and students find themselves bargaining with their dreams. In some cases, colleges close entirely—95 private, nonprofit four-year colleges closed between the 2015-2016 and 2022-2023 academic years, according to the latest federal data. Since June 2023, more than 20 similar colleges have announced they are closed or merging, according to a tracker from Higher Ed Dive.

For institutions like the College of Saint Rose—small, often religiously affiliated liberal arts colleges—this is a “do or die” moment. The major problem facing these and other small institutions is low enrollment, spurred by a combination of demographic changes, growing skepticism about higher education, and eye-popping costs. While elite and highly selective colleges are thriving financially, smaller regional institutions are struggling to survive.

Although the dominant story about America’s colleges has been about campus protests and culture-war battles, for many institutions, the real challenge is just keeping the doors open. How they respond will reshape higher education for decades to come.

HISTORICALLY, HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA has gotten bigger and bigger. Nationwide enrollment grew in all but two years between 1984 and 2010, adding nine million students, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. College degrees have what economists call “countercyclical demand,” meaning when the economy is bad, the rolls swell. The financial crisis gave America’s colleges their biggest class yet, peaking at more than 21 million students across all levels and sectors in 2010.

Since then, nationwide enrollment has declined nearly every year. Today, it stands at more than one million fewer students than it did at its peak.

The most-discussed and perhaps most-feared reason behind the enrollment decline is the changing demographics of the United States. Perhaps spurred by the unfavorable economic conditions of the Great Recession, U.S. fertility rates have generally declined since 2007. That year, the expected average number of children born to women over their lifetimes was 2.12; by 2020 it was 1.64, according to World Bank statistics. Fewer babies then mean fewer college students now.

Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College, is the person perhaps most associated with what some in higher education call “the demographic cliff.” His 2018 book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, was a sensation among the small world of college administrators when it came out.

There were already concerns in higher ed about the birth rate before Grawe’s book, but his analysis turbo-charged the conversation. His central thesis was that not only were birth rates falling, but they were tanking in exactly the populations most likely to attend college: white students from the Northeast and Midwest.

“Nationally, we anticipate declining cohorts starting in the next couple of years,” Grawe told the Prospect. “In the Northeast, we’re already in that period of declining numbers of young people reaching college-going age.”

Selective colleges, Grawe predicts, will be just fine. In fact, they could grow if they wanted to, spurred by an increase in the number of Asian Americans and students with college-educated parents. The demand for degrees from Ivy League and similar institutions exceeds the supply of seats. And multibillion-dollar endowments provide a financial backstop.

But that’s not most colleges.

“Most institutions are not highly selective,” Grawe said. “They’re accepting a large fraction of their students. And when the pool contracts, they don’t have nearly as many choices.”

Grawe has written about a variety of different strategies colleges might use to survive the dip. However, the one his name became inextricably linked to is the process of retrenchment. Officials at Marquette University, a Catholic college in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, assigned its entire leadership team to read Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The university has since laid off dozens of staff and aims to cut $31 million over the next several years, partly in anticipation of Grawe’s predicted 15 percent enrollment drop in the Midwest.

Many of the colleges closing in this most recent wave are similar to the College of Saint Rose. They are liberal arts colleges, religiously affiliated, and located in the Northeast.

“Regional state and private institutions, where population bases are more limited, are struggling more than other institutions,” said Jill Orcutt, a college consultant with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “How far are students and their families willing to relocate for their educational attainment?”

Demographics are likely not the only factor at play in the enrollment drop. Researchers say a growing distrust of higher education is likely also playing a role. Only 36 percent of respondents reported having a good deal of confidence in higher education, a 2024 Gallup poll found. That’s down 21 percentage points since 2015.

There is of course the movement to cast higher education as the domain of “woke” ideology. But it is also impossible to talk about the growing animus toward higher education without talking about cost. Although the true cost of college after grant aid has actually been declining in the last decade, it is still close to $16,000 per year at a private nonprofit college. Most students don’t pay the sticker price for college, but shocking inflation in those advertised numbers only contributes to the feeling that higher education is out of reach. Some public flagships have raised tuition in part to finance large capital projects and new administrative staff, hoping to draw in more students.

Student debt has become a national political issue, as graduates across the country have called for the government to cancel loans that they say are ruining their lives. Some senior citizens are still haunted by debt they took on decades ago. Nearly 37 million people have some college experience but no degree, often facing debt without the benefits of a credential.

There has also been more scrutiny over what exactly students are buying when they pay tuition. More than 80 percent of first-year students say they are attending college in part to get a better job and make more money, according to research from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. On average, college usually pays off, but a strong labor market has increased the opportunity costs of four years in a classroom. Both researchers and the federal government have begun paying far more attention to what kinds of jobs college graduates get, and how much they earn.

All of this has combined to make college seem less and less attractive. Between 2020 and 2022, the share of high school students saying they are considering a bachelor’s degree fell by 20 percentage points. In some circles, college now has a reputation, not entirely unearned, of an expensive gamble.

“If they don’t feel like they have a way to finance it and they are not interested in being crushed by loan debt, they’re just not attending,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), who has studied the effects of school closures.

Even students who might really benefit from higher education sometimes need help to understand a complex system of enrollment, federal aid, and major options. Students at the high school level often don’t have access to high-quality advising and career counseling, said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president of higher education at the think tank the Education Trust. They may also lack programs like dual enrollment, which let them get a taste of college early.

“We haven’t intentionally designed policies that are going to lead to better outcomes for students,” Del Pilar said. “We thought students would figure that out on their own.”

IN THE NEAR TERM, SOME OF HIGHER EDUCATION’S challenges may only get worse. Over the past year, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) has been at the center of a nationwide debacle. The Education Department was tasked with simplifying the form, which held up its release and processing, and technical difficulties created more delays. There were 300,000 fewer applications for student aid this year compared to last year, according to a May report from the Century Foundation.

Amid these challenges, small and regional colleges are trying to grow enrollment any way that they can. Often, that looks like building out online programs and recruiting adult students. In other cases, it may look like focusing on retention or advertising a new sticker price. Some colleges are taking on bold new ventures, like new facilities and programs.

Siena College, a 15-minute drive through Albany from the College of Saint Rose, grew its undergraduate enrollment by nearly 12 percent between 2013 and 2022. Enrollment today is at a record high. That’s in part from adding new programs, such as those in the health sciences, to align with workforce demands in the region. Thirty percent of students are now enrolled in programs that didn’t exist in 2016.

“We need to look at ways to innovate and diversify our revenue,” said Jason Rich, vice president for strategy and communications at Siena. “Career is top focus, not just for students but for families, who are involved in paying for costs.”

But building a college, in the hopes that the students will come, is risky. In order to fix budget shortfalls and in some cases free up funding for other expansions, many colleges have responded with cuts.

At the College of Saint Rose, music and arts saw steep cuts in 2020, but the administration also eliminated degrees in mathematics, chemistry, information technology, and business. Five years earlier, the college eliminated degrees in economics, philosophy, and women’s and gender studies, among others.

At small and regional public colleges, retrenchment doesn’t typically lead to closure because the state can support an institution. But at private nonprofit institutions, many of which are almost entirely dependent on tuition, closing is always on the table.

“We said it back then when they cut the program, ‘This school is going to be closed in five years,’” said Brianna Moss, a graduate of the music education program at the College of Saint Rose and now a middle school band director. “When you take the foundation out of a house, it crumbles.”

(The College of Saint Rose, which closed for instruction in June and will continue administrative functions until the end of 2024, declined to give comments for this article.)

What if the education system was never truly meant to lift millions into economic security?

When colleges close, a community can lose its center. People lose jobs—not just professors and presidents, but janitors, cooks, landscapers, and administrators.

“We’re seeing closures of really well-established institutions with a long history and a lot of alumni,” said Burns. “It’s affecting the whole community.”

One of the reasons closures have been so numerous over the past year is the fact that federal pandemic aid to colleges allowed them to keep operating, even when the revenue they were bringing in was reduced. That aid has now dried up.

“As long as those bailout checks were flowing to the institutions, they were able to navigate not only COVID declines, but also some of the more structural weaknesses that existed,” Grawe said. “Then when the funding disappears, all of a sudden those cracks in the foundation appear.”

Many students who experience a college closure never return to higher education. For students with no prior credential, watching their college close while they’re attending makes them 50 percent less likely to earn a degree than a student who didn’t experience a closure, according to research from Burns and co-authors at SHEEO. Numbers drop even lower for students of color and for men.

For alumni and students, a closure can be a gut punch. Montagno said the closure at Saint Rose, her rush to graduate, and the subsequent cuts at Potsdam, have cast a shadow on her career.

William Gibbons, dean of Potsdam’s music school, said that while the decision to cut the music performance master’s program was difficult, it was a small program, with only 11 students at the time. Sunsetting the program, he said via email, allowed the school to focus on traditional strengths in its undergraduate curriculum.

Even students who have yet to attend college can be impacted by a closure.

“A lot of people assume that private colleges cater to the upper class, or at least the upper-middle class. That’s actually often not the case,” said Paula Langteau, the last president of Presentation College in South Dakota, which closed last year. “There may be less opportunity for students of a lower socioeconomic class to access a four-year degree.”

Langteau now consults for small colleges, helping them with “compassionate closure.” Part of that process, she said, is announcing early, to give students and faculty time to make plans. The process at Saint Rose, painful as it was, was relatively orderly. But closures are sometimes sudden, and their reasons opaque.

University of the Arts, a private arts college in Philadelphia, unexpectedly announced in May that it would be closing in one week. The president resigned and executive functions are now in the hands of a management consulting firm. Current students have the option to attend a “teach-out” program from another college, or to pursue a student loan discharge from the Department of Education. When an institution declares bankruptcy, creditors are typically made whole first; activists like those at the Debt Collective have noted that students have to get in line.

Bradley Philbert taught media courses at University of the Arts. He was picking up wedding rings with his fiancée the day the closure was announced. He heard the news via a push notification from The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is now a named plaintiff in a proposed class action lawsuit against the university.

“I don’t know how a $40 million problem happens in two weeks,” Philbert said, referring to numbers one trustee of the university told the Inquirer.

College officials are often wary of announcing that they are having enrollment or financial problems because that may turn off even more students, said Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability, which offers college financial data for students, faculty, and others to determine whether their college might close. Enrollment, Stocker said, doesn’t tell the whole story. Many colleges offer scholarships or discounts that are unfunded, meaning institutions simply forgo revenue. That gets students in the door, but can mask internal financial problems.

The fact that colleges have more seats than students willing to pay for them is just simple supply and demand, Stocker said. Some of those that have closed were never good educational opportunities to begin with.

“We’re seeing the same kind of market adjustment that we’ve seen in countless other industries over the years,” he said. “Those colleges have earned the right to close.”

THE COLLEGE OF SAINT ROSE IS NOW SELLING OFF its campus, made up of 81 different properties in Albany.

“It’s a ghost town now,” said Bruce Roter, a professor of music at the college for 24 years.

Roter lost his job initially in the 2020 cuts, but was reinstated as the result of a lawsuit. When the college won an appeal, he was out again. The process, he said, was like “fighting to get back on the Titanic.” But the closure has substantiated his belief that a liberal arts college like Saint Rose cannot exist without the arts.

Retrenchment in higher education hasn’t solely affected the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Programs in hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, and math have also been shut down. But the fact that “soft” disciplines have been particularly hard-hit is not a coincidence.

Those disciplines have largely seen declining or flat enrollment. The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in English declined by nearly 24 percent between the 2012-2013 and 2017-2018 academic years. Degrees in foreign languages declined by 22 percent in that period, and degrees in history and social sciences declined 10 percent. For contrast, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in health sciences increased by 35 percent in that time.

It’s likely these subjects are less popular because students believe that a degree in those subjects won’t get them a good job. One of the biggest buzzwords in the higher education world now is “ROI”: return on investment. A program’s ROI is the difference between costs and earnings benefit, and numerous researchers have devoted their time to calculating it.

The federal government has also gotten in the game, posting data about earnings and debt on its College Scorecard website. The Education Department’s “gainful employment” rule, which will go into effect in July, removes funding for career education programs if graduates don’t make more than people in their state with just a high school diploma. If a program doesn’t leave students better off, accountability advocates say, why should the federal government subsidize it?

But some academics have begun to argue that much of the conversation around ROI is missing the point. A growing number of students have found themselves underemployed after college and declared higher education a “scam.” But what if the education system was never truly meant to do what we’ve tasked it with; namely, lifting millions into economic security? What if the fact that the economy is dominated by low-wage service jobs reflects an economic issue, rather than an educational one?

“I don’t want the federal government or anyone else to subsidize programs that are bilking students,” said Neil Kraus, a professor of politics at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. “But the education system cannot change the labor market. It cannot change the jobs that exist in the world or the wages that those jobs pay.”

American politics has increasingly offered educational solutions to economic problems, Kraus writes in his book The Fantasy Economy. When workers are frustrated by stagnating wages and growing inequality, they are told to upskill by getting a degree. Economic policies like raising the minimum wage aren’t part of the conversation.

The gospel of upskilling at any cost has driven countless low-income Americans into poor or predatory education programs. When the responsibility for job training shifted from companies and governments to individual workers, many low-income Americans found themselves pursuing high-risk programs at for-profit colleges, writes sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom in her book Lower Ed.

“When we offer more credentials in lieu of a stronger social contract, it is Lower Ed,” she writes. “When we ask for social insurance and get workforce training, it is Lower Ed.”

Things used to be different. People always understood that education could give you a better job. But higher education’s current role, as the sole way to compete for a diminishing number of good jobs, is unique to the past 50 years, argues historian Jon Shelton in his book The Education Myth.

Private colleges have few options when money is tight. But in public systems, academics and faculty have increasingly argued that austerity is a choice, not a mandate. When public education is viewed solely as job training, cuts can happen, sometimes dramatic ones. And less-wealthy students inevitably see their educational opportunities foreclosed.

“Students who go to elite universities or even go to a place like [the University of Wisconsin] Madison, the flagship, they still get to study everything,” Shelton said in an interview. “But those students who are in regional comprehensives or smaller liberal arts colleges that are private, they’re going to have limits.”

IT’S DIFFICULT TO SAY EXACTLY WHAT will happen next. All but seven states saw enrollment declines between 2017 and 2022.

However, the National Center for Education Statistics predicts that enrollment will increase over the next few years. The center forecasts a nearly 8 percent increase in undergraduate enrollment at four-year colleges between 2022 and 2031. Graduate enrollment is projected to increase 7 percent in that time.

Grawe has said he expects enrollment to continue falling, particularly in the North, with a brief recovery around 2031.

Of course, we may not be able to say exactly what enrollment will look like in the future. But we do know that when an institution is gone, it can be difficult to impossible to bring back.

Lydia Flynn was another student at the College of Saint Rose when the cuts to the music department were announced. Devastated by the decision, she took to practicing her flute in public, just hoping someone would hear it.

Students like her still mattered, she said. “I’m still here.”