Why 2026 Is College Admissions' 'Enrollment Cliff' Year

Andy Gammons has a piece of math he keeps coming back to: take 2008, the year the Great Recession started dragging birth rates down across the country, and add eighteen years. That lands exactly on this year's incoming freshman class, and it's why Gammons, executive director of admissions at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, doesn't talk about 2026 as just another admissions cycle. On episode 119 of Students Incorporated, Gammons and Taylor senior Tyler Smith, a second-year admissions intern, laid out what the industry has spent nearly two decades bracing for: the "enrollment cliff," a demographic drop in college-age students that has stopped being a forecast and become the year applicants are actually living through.

The numbers back up Gammons' math almost exactly. Projections from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) put the number of U.S. high school graduates at a peak of roughly 3.9 million in 2025, with a sustained decline from here expected to cut the national total by about 13 percent by 2041. The cause is the same recession Gammons points to: U.S. births fell from more than 4 million a year in 2000 to about 3.6 million by 2024, and the birth rate dropped over the same stretch from roughly 65 per 1,000 women of childbearing age to about 54. Fewer babies born during and after the recession means fewer 18-year-olds applying to college now, and the decline isn't spread evenly across the country. WICHE projects the steepest drops in the West, around 20 percent over 15 years, with continued double-digit declines across the Midwest and Northeast, while a handful of states, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho, and North Dakota among them, are still expected to see their graduate numbers grow.

A Buyer's Market With a Catch

Fewer high schoolers chasing the same number of college seats should be straightforwardly good news for applicants, and in one sense it is: Gammons calls it a buyer's market, with more leverage flowing toward students than at any point in recent memory. But the market isn't splitting evenly among schools either. Large research institutions, the flagship state schools, the University of Floridas and University of Michigans of the world, are getting more competitive, not less, as students converge on recognizable names. Smaller institutions are the ones absorbing the shortfall, and Gammons doesn't soften the forecast: "We really anticipate in the next decade there will be more and more closures of higher education institutions, especially those smaller ones."

That isn't a hypothetical. A 2026 projection from Huron Consulting Group, reported by NPR and The Hechinger Report, estimated that 442 of the nation's roughly 1,700 private nonprofit four-year colleges, enrolling a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or merging within the next decade, with more than 120 already sitting at the highest risk tier. At least 16 colleges shut down in 2025 alone, among them Siena Heights University in Michigan, Limestone University in South Carolina, and St. Andrews University in North Carolina, and 2026 has already added several more to that list. The stakes for a student caught in one of those closures are steep: according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, fewer than half of students at a college that closes ever finish their degree anywhere else.

That reframes a question students never used to think to ask. "What's your financial viability like?" is not something an 18-year-old typically has on their list, Gammons said, but it belongs there now. An unusually generous financial aid package isn't just good luck. It can be a symptom of a school trying to buy its way out of the same trouble it's warning students about.

If a college is giving you an absolutely amazing deal, there may be a reason for that.

The uncomfortable version of that scenario: enrolling somewhere on a great price, then watching the school announce a closure partway through a degree, exactly the pattern playing out at the small, tuition-dependent colleges most exposed to the cliff.

The Application Confusion Nobody Names

Before any of that, Gammons said, most students misjudge the shape of the process itself. They assume every college works like the most selective ones, the schools where admission is a genuine contest. In reality, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of institutions worldwide operate close to open enrollment: if a student wants in, the school wants them. The confusion isn't about whether a student is competitive. It's about not knowing which category the target school even falls into, and therefore not knowing what kind of effort the application actually calls for.

Find the Person Who'll Actually Help You

Both guests pushed back on how students treat the people already assigned to help them. Gammons named the admissions counselor as the most underused resource on any campus, with a caveat. Counselors are often just a few years older than the students they're advising, sometimes only 22 or 23, and not every one of them is going to be a strong advocate. His advice: if a counselor isn't responsive, ask for their supervisor's name directly. It's an uncomfortable move, but it also doubles as a diagnostic. "If you can't find somebody who's helpful and responsive in the admissions office, that is not a good sign for that institution," Gammons said, comparing counselors to a company's sales team: if the people whose job is to sell you on the place won't return your messages, that tells you something about what happens after you enroll.

Faculty are the other underused resource, and Smith had a specific story for it. He and a group of friends play a campus game at Taylor called Tolf: golf, played with tennis balls, across a roughly twelve-hole course threaded through campus. A new marketing professor spotted them playing, said she wanted in, and Smith invited her along with seven of his friends. He still has the photo. It's a small moment, but it's the kind of unscheduled access to faculty that most students never think to take advantage of: office hours sitting open and unused down the hall.

Choosing a Major Without a Career Attached

Smith is a marketing major heading into a sales job at an insurance company that covers sports venues, arenas, and family entertainment centers, a job with no direct line back to his coursework. Gammons, a former Spanish major himself, said that gap is normal and by design: outside of a handful of licensed fields (nursing, engineering, education) a major rarely maps directly onto a career, so the better move is studying whatever a student is genuinely interested in and will do well in, on the theory that those two things are usually the same subject.

He offered a counterexample from his own family. His wife majored in accounting because her parents told her she was good at math, worked as an accountant for a year, and confirmed it wasn't what she wanted, using the skills again and again since, but never in the way she expected. His son, a business management major, only landed a project management job in commercial construction because of two prior summers at the same company: the first as a carpenter's apprentice, hammer in hand doing grunt work, the second as a project management intern. "They were much more interested in his out-of-classroom experience," Gammons said. Smith's own path ran the same way: four summers cold-calling as a sales intern, sometimes twenty or thirty calls a day, is what actually built the résumé his marketing degree didn't.

The Costs Nobody Puts in the Budget Conversation

Asked what catches students off guard financially beyond tuition and housing, Smith spoke from the student side of the ledger: weekend social life. Thirty-dollar basketball tickets in Indianapolis, late-night food runs: none of it is free, and he credits one decision, quitting a high school sport senior year to take a part-time job instead, with giving him the cushion to cover it without stress.

Gammons pointed to a steeper version of the same problem for students studying abroad: travel. He described a former Taylor student from India who completed four years at Taylor and then a five-year PhD at Florida Atlantic University without returning home once in nine years, a deliberate choice he and his family made because of what the flights would cost. Study abroad programs carry their own costs layered on top of tuition, too. Gammons' advice is blunt and practical: run the actual numbers on flights home before enrolling, and have the conversation with family about who pays for what, before it becomes an emergency instead of a plan.

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