January 1, 1970

The College Enrollment Crisis: Which Schools Are Closing in 2025 and 2026

The class that enrolled in fall 2025 was the last big one. That sounds alarmist, but the numbers are clear: the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) projects that U.S. high school graduates peaked at roughly 3.9 million in 2025 and are now falling. Not dipping. Falling, steadily, for the next fifteen years. For hundreds of small colleges already running on fumes, that peak wasn't a milestone. It was the cliff's edge.

Sixteen nonprofit colleges closed or announced closures in 2025. Early 2026 has already added eight more. And a Hechinger Report projection found that over 442 private nonprofit four-year colleges — more than 25 percent of the total — are at moderate to significant risk of closing or merging within the next decade. Those schools currently enroll nearly 670,000 students.

This is not a slow-moving problem anymore.

Why Colleges Are Closing Now, Not Later

Two crises arrived at the same time, and they're feeding each other.

The first is demographic. The 2008 financial crisis caused U.S. birth rates to drop sharply. Those unborn children would have turned 18 starting around 2026. Instead, colleges are now recruiting from a shrinking pool each year, and the gap widens through the 2030s. WICHE data shows the West will see roughly a 20% decline in high school graduates by 2041, the Northeast around 17%, and the Midwest nearly 16%. Only 12 states are projected to see growth.

The second is behavioral. The share of high school graduates who enroll in college immediately after graduation has already dropped from 70 percent to 62 percent over the last decade. Students are choosing trade programs, online certificates, apprenticeships, or just heading directly into the workforce. The "college for everyone" consensus that defined the early 2000s has genuinely fractured.

Together, these forces are compressing the applicant pool from both ends — fewer teenagers, and fewer teenagers who see a four-year degree as the obvious path.

The Schools That Didn't Make It in 2025

The 2025 closure list reads like a map of American higher education's most vulnerable geography.

Bacone College in Oklahoma is one of the starkest examples. Enrollment collapsed from roughly 1,000 students in 2013 to just over 100 by 2023. The school tried for years to arrest the slide before eventually filing for bankruptcy and liquidating. That's a decade of slow-motion decline that nobody managed to stop.

Limestone University in South Carolina (enrollment near 1,600) launched an emergency $6 million fundraising campaign in a last-ditch effort to stay open. It failed. After closing, the school owed 281 students nearly $400,000 in refunds — a detail that should give every prospective transfer student pause when evaluating a financially distressed school.

Seven of the sixteen 2025 closures were Penn State Commonwealth Campuses — regional branches of a major public university system that collectively served almost 3,200 students. Penn State framed the decision as strategic consolidation, but the underlying driver was identical to what's closing private colleges: per-student operating costs at small regional campuses had become impossible to justify.

Five of the 2025 closures were religiously affiliated colleges. Small Catholic, evangelical, and mainline Protestant schools have been closing for years, because their missions require expensive low student-to-faculty ratios that tuition revenue can no longer support. The writing was on the wall long before announcements were made.

2026 Closures: The Running List

The pace has not slowed. Schools that announced closures heading into or during 2026 include:

Anna Maria College (Paxton, Massachusetts) — board unable to project financial resources to sustain operations past spring 2026
Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts) — a 60-year-old liberal arts institution shutting down after the fall 2026 semester
Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan) — small private Catholic college closing at the end of the 2026 academic year
Trinity Christian College (near Chicago, Illinois) — citing "significant and rapidly evolving financial challenges," closing at the end of 2025–26
Northland College (Ashland, Wisconsin) — held its final commencement in 2025 after 133 years of continuous operation

Hampshire's closure carries a particular symbolic weight. Founded in 1970 without grades or traditional majors, it was built around self-directed learning and small seminar culture. The very model that made it distinctive — intimate, expensive, impossible to scale — is also what made it financially fragile. When enrollment dropped, there was no safety valve.

What Puts a School at Risk

Not every small private college is on borrowed time. But researchers have mapped the warning signs clearly. Robert Kelchen, Dubravka Ritter, and Douglas Webber used an XGBoost machine learning model published in Education Next to identify which institutions face the highest closure probability, and the patterns are consistent across multiple independent analyses.

Risk Factor	Why It Matters
Tuition dependency above 85%	No endowment buffer when enrollment dips
Enrollment under 1,000 students	Fixed costs spread across too few payers
Three or more consecutive years of enrollment decline	Downward trends rarely self-correct
Located in Midwest or Northeast	Worst demographic headwinds through 2041
No graduate or online programs	Locked out of faster-growing enrollment markets
Niche mission with limited program breadth	Hard to pivot or attract new student populations

The through-line in most closures isn't one catastrophic year. It's five years of slow decline that leadership treated as a temporary dip rather than a structural shift. Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, put it directly: "It's not corruption; it's not financial misappropriation of funds; it's just that they can't rebound enrollment."

What Happens to Students When a School Closes

This part gets too little attention in the closure coverage.

Only about half of students from closed colleges successfully transfer to another institution, according to research tracked by the Hechinger Report. The rest stop out — sometimes temporarily, sometimes for good. Completion rates for those who do transfer vary based on how quickly they re-enroll and how aggressively the receiving school applies transfer credit restrictions.

Students caught mid-degree face three immediate problems:

Credit portability — courses at a liberal arts school may not transfer cleanly to a state university, particularly general education requirements
Financial aid gaps — a student's package at the old school doesn't carry over automatically; the new school's aid office starts fresh
Timing — closures announced in March for a May shutdown leave almost no runway for thoughtful decision-making

The Limestone University case, where the school owed 281 students nearly $400,000 in refunds they had to pursue after the fact, shows that even a school's basic financial obligations don't always get resolved cleanly or quickly.

"It's not corruption; it's not financial misappropriation of funds; it's just that they can't rebound enrollment." — Rachel Burns, State Higher Education Executive Officers Association

How to Tell If Your School Is in Trouble

If you're currently enrolled at a small private college in the Northeast or Midwest, there are real signals worth monitoring — and you don't need insider knowledge to find them.

Check publicly available financial data. Every nonprofit college files a Form 990 with the IRS. Look at the audited financial statements attached. Red flags include: negative net assets, multi-year operating deficits, and an endowment being drawn down faster than it's growing. The federal IPEDS database (run by the National Center for Education Statistics) publishes enrollment trends for every accredited school going back years.

Watch for behavioral signals. Faculty departures, cancelled programs, deferred maintenance, reduced campus services, and suddenly announced "strategic reviews" often precede a closure announcement by 12 to 24 months. When a school stops replacing departed faculty, it's usually not a coincidence.

A practical decision framework for students and families:

Enrollment declined 3+ consecutive years: look carefully at financials
Enrollment under 500 students: look very carefully
Operating deficits in the most recent two annual reports: start building a transfer plan
School announces an "emergency" fundraising campaign: act quickly

The Schools Most Likely to Survive

The picture isn't uniformly grim. Some institutions have structural advantages that insulate them from demographic pressure.

Large public universities with state appropriations and diversified revenue aren't at risk. The University of Michigan, Ohio State, and the University of Texas system aren't going anywhere. Their enrollment numbers may soften, but their operating models don't depend on headcount alone.

Research universities with endowments can absorb enrollment shocks that would destroy a tuition-dependent school. Harvard's endowment currently sits around $50.7 billion — it could theoretically fund the entire university for years without a single tuition dollar. That's an extreme case, but it illustrates the buffer that endowment wealth provides.

Schools serving fast-growing demographic segments are better positioned than their geography might suggest. Institutions with Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) designations are recruiting from the fastest-growing segment of the college-age population. Community colleges tied to workforce development in growing metro areas face an entirely different demand curve than a rural liberal arts college in Vermont.

Online-first institutions, whatever their reputation challenges, don't face the geography constraints crushing regional brick-and-mortar schools. Their applicant market is national. A small religious college in rural Wisconsin can't say the same.

The honest assessment: a school that is small, tuition-dependent, located in a declining-population region, has no strong alumni donor base, and hasn't expanded its offerings in a decade is in real trouble. Wishing it otherwise doesn't change the math. Schools that survive the next fifteen years will be the ones that treated this as a structural planning problem — not a temporary enrollment blip to ride out.

Bottom Line

If you're currently enrolled at a small private college, check its financial health now. Pull the IPEDS enrollment trends and scan the Form 990. If you see multi-year deficits and shrinking headcounts, build a transfer contingency plan before you need it.
If you're choosing a college, ask explicitly about operating margins, endowment size relative to annual operating budget, and tuition dependency ratio. A school that deflects those questions is telling you something.
The closures happening now are an early wave, not the peak. WICHE's demographic data is not speculative — the students who would have enrolled in 2030 have already been born, or not. Schools that haven't adapted by building online capacity, pursuing mergers with financially stronger partners, or diversifying their student pipelines are running short on options.

The schools that make it through the next decade will be the ones that made hard decisions five years ago — not the ones still hoping the numbers reverse on their own.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many colleges have closed in recent years?

Between 2008 and 2023, nearly 300 degree-granting institutions shut down in the U.S. The pace has been escalating: 2024 saw 28 closures in just the first nine months, and 2025 recorded 16 nonprofit closures. For-profit colleges have accounted for more than 60% of all closed degree-granting institutions, but the current wave is hitting accredited nonprofits hard too.

What exactly is the "enrollment cliff" and how severe will it be?

The enrollment cliff refers to the sustained drop in college-age students caused by the birth rate decline following the 2008 recession. WICHE projects high school graduate counts will fall by roughly 13% between 2026 and 2041. The West, Northeast, and Midwest are hit hardest. Only 12 states are projected to see high school graduate growth over that same period.

If my college closes mid-semester, what happens to my credits?

This depends heavily on the receiving institution. About half of students from closed colleges successfully transfer, but transfer credit acceptance varies widely. Financial aid doesn't automatically carry over, and refunds owed by the closing school can take months to recover. The faster you begin the transfer process after a closure announcement, the more options you have — including retaining credits earned.

Isn't this mainly a problem for low-quality or predatory for-profit colleges?

That was true for the 2010s wave of closures. The current wave is different. Accredited nonprofit liberal arts colleges, religiously affiliated schools with long histories, and even campuses within established public university systems like Penn State are now closing. Northland College operated for 133 years. Hampshire College was founded in 1970. Institutional age or nonprofit status doesn't insulate a school from enrollment math.

Which regions are seeing the most closures?

Pennsylvania had the most closures in 2025, largely due to the seven Penn State Commonwealth Campus shutdowns. New England has seen disproportionate closures given its high concentration of small private colleges and steep projected demographic decline. Michigan, Illinois, and Massachusetts have also seen notable shutdowns. Rural institutions in the South and Midwest face similar pressures, though the timing varies.

What should I do if I think my college might be at risk?

Start with data: check IPEDS enrollment trends and the school's Form 990 filings (both public). Look for multi-year operating deficits and declining enrollment — three or more consecutive years of decline is a serious signal. Simultaneously, research transfer credit policies at two or three schools you'd consider attending. You don't have to transfer. But knowing your options takes the panic out of any future announcement.