John Marcus

About 100 colleges are closed since the pandemic.

Many of them only made it this far because they got federal aid during the pandemic to keep them open.

Had they not, they would have probably closed sooner.

And there's a new estimate that shows that 442 private nonprofit colleges and universities, that's one quarter of the total, are at risk.

And about 120 of them are at severe risk of closing.

And we can talk about some of the reasons for that if you'd like.

Please, go for it.

So we are running out of students.

The number of 18-year-olds is way down.

People stop having children during financial downturns.

And if you do the math, the Great Recession was in 2008.

So in 2026 is when that hits us.

18 years later, we're running out of 18-year-olds.

And that will begin to have an impact on college enrollment in the fall.

The last big class was the one that enrolled in this most recent fall.

The next fall is when what they call the demographic cliff begins to hit.

And it's just math.

We have too many colleges and we have too few traditional age college students.

Of the ones we still have, a smaller proportion of graduates from high school are choosing to go to college.

So we hit a peak in 2016 of 70% of high school graduates going to college.