Higher education institutions have been staring down a looming demographic reality that threatens not only their financial well-being but the nation’s workforce at large.
The number of high school graduates in the country peaked in 2025 at nearly 3.9 million and is expected to steadily decline through 2041, according to which has .
About 18 years ago, Americans stopped having as many babies.
Between 2007 and 2025, births in the U.S. declined by 16%. In Colorado, they decreased about 8% during the same timeframe, according to Neal Marquez, projections demographer at the .
The Boulder-based Western Interstate Commission between 2023 and 2041. A total of 60,387 Colorado students graduated in four years in the 2024-25 school year, according to state data.
Higher education officials have watched their pool of typical applicants dwindle little by little. Most have been in talks for years on how to pivot to stave off what education officials have collectively dubbed “the demographic enrollment cliff.”
In Colorado, many institutions have managed to keep a positive enrollment trajectory so far, but now they’re peering over the edge of the cliff, hoping they can incentivize enough new applicants with promises of affordability and resources.
“What we’ve tried to emphasize is that demography is not destiny,” said Patrick Lane, vice president of policy analysis and research at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. “We are here at this inflection point where there will be fewer high school graduates in the future, but throughout history, there have been points where the number of births and potential high school graduates have declined, and higher education has found ways to increase access.
“Are we able to do that now? That’s the key question.”
The reason for the decline is largely attributable to a dramatic reduction in pregnancies among teens and young women — in part due to more accessible contraception — coupled with , Marquez said.
Higher education experts predict fiercer competition among colleges trying to attract students from a smaller cohort, as well as potential enrollment declines that could rock an institution’s bottom line. Not to mention, critical jobs requiring a degree, like nurses and teachers, need the support of a workforce to best serve their communities.
How are universities responding?
a public regional institution in the San Luis Valley, experienced about 15 years of declining undergraduate enrollment before an upturn in the past few years, President David Tandberg said.
In the fall, undergraduate enrollment rose 4.7% from 2024 with 1,721 students attending.
“We’re really proud of that, but itap not going to get any easier,” Tandberg said.
There will be much more competition for students among institutions — not only when it comes to Colorado students, but also college-seekers nationwide — as fertility rates decrease across the country, Tandberg said.
“That is compounded by the fact that we, as a state, are not importing people at the rate we used to,” Tandberg said. “We’ve never been great at getting our Colorado high schoolers into our colleges and universities, and yet have had a comparatively high educational attainment rate because we imported people and imported a lot of out-of-state students as a sector, and it looks like that is going to be harder to do.”
Adams State bills itself as the most diverse public university in Colorado. The Alamosa-based college became the first in the state in 1998, and half of its students are the first in their families to attend college. The school’s largest demographic are students of color.
Lane and other higher education experts said institutions must focus on recruiting and catering to non-traditional college students. It’s a strategy that’s already foundational to Adams State’s mission, as it serves the lowest-income region of the state, Tandberg said.
“We’ve kind of had the market cornered on that and obviously every other college and university is going to want to move into markets of growth, so we expect increased competition in that regard,” Tandberg said. “We’ve got to be more innovative, hustle more and we’ve been doing that.”
The Western Interstate Commission also advises universities on potential ways to offset the decline.
Removing barriers for non-traditional students like prohibitive costs or complicated admissions and financial aid processes is one way to improve access, said Lane, who helps create the commission’s enrollment reports.
Lane pointed to Adams State’s direct admissions program as a smart intervention that attracts students who might have otherwise overlooked college.
Adams State bills itself as the first university in Colorado to offer direct admissions, meaning all graduates of San Luis Valley high schools and a few other districts across the state, including Adams County School District 14, are automatically accepted. That makes Adams State an open-access institution.
“We don’t have an admissions rate we can adjust to hit our enrollment targets,” Tandberg said. “We fight for every single student, and, in some ways, that exposes us a little bit more to the demographic declines because the pool we’re pulling from is the pool we’re pulling from, and we get who we get. From our founding, we have had a mission of serving the underserved. We do it tremendously well because thatap our entire mission, and I think state leaders ought to consider that in their funding decisions.”
The also guarantees free tuition and fees for any in-state, full-time student whose family makes $70,000 or less.
“For institutions that are more selective, this won’t be a huge deal,” Lane said of the enrollment cliff. “They might just go further down their admission list. But for open-access institutions and community colleges, I think it’s a big deal because, ultimately, enrollment is a big deal.”
Staying relevant
Representatives of the state’s flagship university, for example, appeared less concerned about the decline.
“The is well-positioned to meet our for fall 2026, despite a nationwide demographic decline,” campus spokesperson Nicole Cousins said in a statement. “While enrollment figures will not become available until September, when we release our annual student census data, first-year confirmations are up compared to this time last year.”
At , enrollment has been on the rise, with the Auraria campus institution welcoming more than 18,000 students this fall, a 3.1% increase over last year’s enrollment, according to institutional data.
Notably, there was a 1% increase in students aged 18 to 24 — the shrinking, traditional college-going age.
“From a recruitment standpoint, our admit numbers look strong, so we’re hopeful we can still get one more year where we’re strong on enrollment, but itap really hard to tell,” said Megan Scherzberg, interim associate vice president of enrollment management. “However, we are preparing and having these conversations about what to expect as increased competition hits the state. All of us are also having this conversation of how do we keep our market share and increase our market share when our high school graduate numbers are going down.”
MSU Denver — known for serving a large population of , first-generation students, working students, adult learners and parents — is balancing being more appealing to non-traditional college students with competing for that smaller pool of high school graduates as it works to offset potential enrollment declines.
“When we think about the more adult learner, non-traditional student, they’re just harder to find,” Scherzberg said. “You don’t have a captive audience like a junior class, senior class, so that means we’ve got to get more creative: making connections with industry partnerships to think about what the industry needs, digital ads, marketing, branding and showcasing post-grad outcomes related to employment and compensation, too.”
The university is reaching out to veterans and military-connected students and transfer students while simultaneously hoping the traditional college student finds the university’s first on-campus housing project under construction appealing.
While enrollment is on the up and up now, Scherzberg extrapolated on why higher education institutions are taking these demographic shifts so seriously.
“Declining enrollment for an institution, depending on the institution’s ability to navigate these challenges, could mean closing doors for some smaller institutions if we don’t have the pipeline of students to enter,” she said. “It could mean losing jobs for faculty and staff, if we don’t have the students to fill the seats. It may mean institutions have to make some difficult decisions with regards to right-sizing and how many students are we able to serve and how many faculty and staff would we need to be able to serve those students.”
‘Perfect storm of fewer students’
The is going through that right-sizing process now as it grapples with a $30 million budget shortfall. Budget reductions at the private research institution have meant hard conversations about what and who to cut.
The demographic changes are one of several factors that led to cuts, said Todd Rinehart, CU’s vice chancellor for enrollment.
Enrollment declined the past two years at DU after years of growth, Rinehart said. Part of that decline, he said, was an intentional strategy by the university to keep the student population more sustainable financially and return to a class size from a decade ago that might be more manageable.
It’s not just the smaller number of high school graduates keeping enrollment offices up at night, Rinehart said. In recent years, about 70% of graduating seniors have gone directly to college, Rinehart said. , only 60% did.
Compounding that trend, larger, “name-brand” research universities are expected to expand their freshman class to make up for fewer international students and federal cuts to research dollars executed under the Trump administration.
“It’s a perfect storm of fewer students,” Rinehart said.
President John Marshall views declining enrollment a bit differently than his peers. He went so far as to call the demographic change “overhyped.” Enrollment at CMU has been increasing with 9,788 students signed up this fall, a few more students than the year prior, and nearly 800 more students than in 2023.
“Most universities are still fishing for kids in a shrinking pond,” Marshall said. “They’re still trying to go after those kids who have typically had access to college… are you conceding the other half of kids have no place in college? You have somewhere between 40 to 50% of high school graduates who are going nowhere, and we’re all wringing our hands as though there’s nothing to be done about that. Let’s go get serious about being relevant to everyone.”
CMU, located in Grand Junction, has invested in trade programs, advisers for first-generation students and merit programs to help support students from middle-income families, Marshall said.
In the K-12 school district , in CMU’s backyard, there were fewer high school seniors last year than the year before, Marshall said.
“The question is, can we still be relevant enough that students vote with their feet in greater numbers and students who haven’t typically gone on to college come to us? And if we can do that, I think we can continue to grow,” he said.
