Nalia Mutz started her freshman year at the University of Lynchburg in 2022 knowing exactly where she wanted to be four years later: right on track toward her dream of becoming a doctor. When the university eliminated a dozen majors in 2024, the resulting layoffs left fewer professors to teach the science courses she needed to graduate. She began to fear earning her biomedicine degree the way she had planned could take two extra years.
Higher education has faced fiscal headwinds in recent years as hundreds of institutions grapple with declining enrollment because of demographic trends and growing public skepticism about the value of a college degree. Trump policies targeting international students and cutting federal research funding made the financial situation more dire, as have new caps to graduate student loan borrowing and threats to block undergraduate programs from accepting federal financial aid unless alumni earn more than a typical high school graduate. As colleges tighten their belts, millions of students like Mutz feel the consequences.
Small, private non-profit institutions that rely heavily on tuition – like the University of Lynchburg – are likely to be hit hardest. While just a small fraction of colleges will end up closing, those that survive may resort to cutting programs and staff, a move that could balance the books but leave students adrift. Experts and students themselves say it is time to pay more attention to the impact of college downsizing.
The tracker also includes data on faculty layoffs and cuts to academic programs, as well as accreditation decisions. Hundreds of four-year colleges and universities show clear signs of financial stress, according to Hechinger’s analysis of a decade of federal higher education data for colleges primarily granting bachelor’s degrees. Roughly 1,100 out of the 1,900 colleges in our dataset experienced enrollment drops in three of the five years from 2019 to 2024, the most recent year for which data is available.
About 6.4 million students attended these schools. About 1,500 colleges saw net revenue from tuition drop from 2019 to 2024. Roughly 960 institutions, enrolling 5.2 million students, had 75,600 fewer instructional staff in that period.
Nearly 440 colleges and universities reported ending the financial year in the red in three of those five years. It can be hard for students and families to figure out how a college is doing financially. Small colleges tend to provide limited information about their finances in annual public reports.
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