Demographic Cliff

I don’t know if you’ve heard about the “demographic cliff” or “enrollment cliff,” but this is something that higher ed has been monitoring for years. The number of high school graduates is expected to peak around 2025 or 2026, then the number of students enrolling in college will decline pretty significantly. This will affect the admit rates for students who plan to go to college. Enrollment is already down about 10% since 2022. On average, colleges are admitting a larger proportion of their applicants as you will see in the pics included here. The American Enterprise Institute found that the median acceptance rate was 7.6% higher in 2022 than 2012.

Even though there are still schools with single digit admit rates, those schools represent an extremely small percentage of all the colleges and universities in the country. Due to these “highly rejective” schools being so prominent in students’ minds, 45% of college aged students think it’s harder to get into college than it was for their parents’ generation. As of 2022, 87% of four year colleges accepted more than half of the students who applied (that’s up from 80% in 2012). There are only 33 of those highly rejective schools nationwide who accepted 10% or fewer of their applicants in 2022 according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Due to these demographic changes and lower number of high school graduates, there will be a smaller supply of students applying to college. (Enrollment is down another 5% this year.) Federal data shows that the number of high school graduates going directly to college fell from a high of 70% in 2015 to 62% in 2022. All of this means that getting into college is going to continue to become easier due to basic supply and demand. Hopefully, understanding these trends will relieve some of the stress students feel when applying to college.