When 1,492 seniors received their diplomas from the University of Denver in the spring, they represented the university’s largest senior class since World War II. But just four years after those students first arrived on campus, the university’s first-year classes are dropping by hundreds of students, a receding tide that could continue as the number of high school graduates across Colorado and the country ebbs for at least the next 15 years.
Colorado belongs to a pack of 38 states on track to see their numbers of high school graduates repeatedly decrease in what’s widely become known as the “enrollment cliff” or “demographic cliff.” Plummeting birth rates that began during the Great Recession in 2007 sent smaller waves of students through K-12 schools, and they now are graduating and considering higher education.
Leaders across Colorado colleges and universities, however, say they aren’t bracing for an immediate cliff, instead anticipating the drop will play out gradually as more of a downward slope.
Still, the possibility of enrollment losses saddles institutions of higher education with another challenge at a time they are facing a growing list of pressures.
Many schools are racing to keep up with shifting workforce demands and the breakneck speed of artificial intelligence. Universities across the country have scrambled to absorb federal funding cuts for academic research. International students are steering away from U.S. institutions after attempts by the Trump administration to enforce travel bans and reject visas. And some students and families have become more skeptical about the value of a degree with repeated tuition hikes, which Colorado institutions have come to rely on as state funding for higher education has largely stayed stagnant.
All of which has cornered presidents and chancellors into a search for “survival strategies,” JB Holston, executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, told The Colorado Sun.
“Right now, the way that the sector works is pretty much everybody tries to compete with everybody else in everything, and that’s not going to work,” Holston said. “That’s not going to be a survival strategy. The institutions are going to have to make very hard choices about what they do, what they don’t do and move quickly to adopt new strategies if they’re going to survive through this.”
The good news, Holston added, is that colleges and universities have a long history of adapting.
“Higher ed universities as a construct have existed for almost a thousand years now,” he said, “and so they’ve figured out a way to survive through lots of changes over time.”
College and university leaders are quick to point out that a higher education degree often translates into a greater chance of long-term financial stability — people with a bachelor’s degree earn a median of $2.8 million over their lifetime, compared to $1.6 million made by those with a high school diploma.
They also know they are living through the next chapter of transformation, with a sweeping realization that they must begin retooling their programs to suit the needs of a much broader pool of learners. Educators are mindful of potential enrollment declines long term while also plotting out how to serve students other than those fresh out of high school.
“I think the question for a lot of institutions isn’t necessarily, will there be fewer students? But really I think asking the question of, who will those students be and are we prepared to serve them?” said Pete Lien, associate vice president for enrollment management at the University of Northern Colorado.
He sees an “ever-changing” student population on the horizon, full of transfer students, adult learners, students with some college credit but no degree, graduate students, workforce learners and people pursuing certificates and short-term credentials.
“We cannot continue to have this mindset of, students need to be ready for college,” Lien said. “We need to be ready for whatever the new learner is going to look like.”
Re-evaluating everything
High school graduates nationally and in Colorado were slated to peak with the class of 2025, according to projections by the Boulder-based Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education in a 2024 report. Estimates point to Colorado’s class of 2041 falling to 56,457 graduating seniors, down 14% from 2025, when a projected 65,716 students earned their high school diplomas. (The commission does not yet have concrete state or national graduation figures for 2025 and 2026. The most recent firm numbers they base projections on are from the class of 2023.)
At the same time, student demographics are in a state of flux, with the number of Hispanic students across the country set to increase — Hispanic students are projected to make up more than a third of public high school graduates in 2041.
While Colorado isn’t facing as sharp of declines in high school graduates as some other states, its dwindling population of high school graduates is feeding the national slump: The latest projections from the commission suggest that the U.S. graduating class of 2041 will have 13% fewer students than the class of 2025. That adds up to a difference of about 484,000 graduates from public and private schools.
That could stir up tension among universities vying for fewer students, but it could also prod institutions to double down on ways to increase completion rates, said Colleen Falkenstern, one of the authors of the commission’s report, Knocking at the College Door.
“I like to remind folks that no state graduates 100% of their high school students and no state enrolls 100% of their high school graduates and no state completes 100% of students in postsecondary education,” Falkenstern said in an interview with The Sun. “So there remains a lot of opportunity.”
Leaders at the University of Colorado, the state’s largest university, say they are keeping tabs on the smaller pools of high schoolers in the coming years but they don’t foresee a sudden dropoff in students. Interest in the flagship university in Boulder has held steady, clear from the more than 71,000 applications from first-year students for this next school year, Provost Ann Stevens said.
Applications from out-of-state students are down slightly, but Stevens remains confident the incoming class will land somewhere close to last year’s total of 7,884 students.
Looking ahead, enrollment is more uncertain, Stevens said. It’s hard to predict whether the rate of students attending college will change — just over half of Colorado high school graduates in 2022 transitioned into postsecondary programs the fall after graduation, according to the most recent data available from CDHE.
It’s equally challenging to forecast the numbers of out-of-state students committing to CU in Boulder or anticipate the adjustments other colleges and universities will make to buffer themselves against declining enrollment, Stevens said.
“Every higher education institution is facing these changes and what other institutions do will affect the students that come to us,” she said. “And so it’s just a complicated set of changes that we can’t predict perfectly and so because of that we have to be more ready for changes.”
That tall task of getting ready involves analyzing the university’s five-year budget outlook through the worst- and best-case scenarios, Stevens said. CU must also stay on top of updating its curriculum, making sure that what students learn gives them a promising start to their career.
“Thinking about career preparation is more important today than, I think, ever before,” Stevens said. “We don’t necessarily find them jobs but engaging them in services that let them say, ‘Here’s what I’m learning in my coursework and here’s how to think about translating that to things that employers are going to be looking for.’”
University officials are also weighing giving more financial support to students for housing and living expenses, likely turning to philanthropy.
“We’re living in a time of general inflation and economic pressures,” Stevens said, “so that’s another area where we want to keep things accessible for Colorado and national students.”
The question of how to make a college education affordable to a broader swath of students is becoming a more pressing one to answer at the University of Denver and other private institutions that work to draw students from across the country. That could become a bigger challenge — and opportunity — for schools like DU as the mix of high schoolers shifts, with more first-generation students and graduates from low- and moderate-income families who don’t usually go to college five or 10 states away, said Todd Rinehart, vice chancellor for enrollment at DU.
“I think what a lot of us worry about, if there’s many more of those students, we still have limited budgets so there’s only so many students that each of us can serve,” Rinehart said. “It’s a real opportunity for universities to diversify in ways we’ve never seen before, and that’s exciting. But the worry about it on the backend is, can our financial aid budgets sustain and really support these future students?”
The university has continued to increase its financial aid budget at the same time leaders have been working to pinpoint a first-year class size DU could sustain year after year, a “sweet spot” for enrollment, Rinehart said. That will allow DU to level out after its historically large senior class this past school year coincided with a smaller incoming class of 1,147 students.
“That challenge on the budget side is you’re trying to manage something that is a dramatic change,” he said. “Over time these changes will not be as dramatic because we’re going to set a baseline that will be kind of the new normal moving forward.”
The process of right sizing is a campuswide effort, rippling across individual colleges within DU and forcing university leaders to rethink academic advising, student affairs and residential life.
Conversations are still in early stages, Rinehart said, but one immediate consideration among residential life staff is the number of buildings needed to house students. DU could close one building for a year or two to address renovations and upgrades and save on costs for heat and air conditioning, Rinehart said.
“It’s also allowing you to kind of take a pause, determine, hey, do you really need your full inventory of buildings moving forward?” he said.
A bigger problem: low college-going rates
For some college and university leaders, concerns over a downturn in the number of high school graduates pale in comparison to sluggish college-going rates in Colorado.
“I would say that’s the bigger issue and also the solution,” said David Tandberg, president of Adams State University in Alamosa.
Many of the students who forgo higher education skew low income, Tandberg said, and also include students of color as well as students who would be the first in their family to attend college.
Those students are the ones Adams State University has built its programs around, Tandberg said. Close to half of its undergraduate students pursuing a degree are first-generation students and more than 32% are Hispanic, university data shows. A significant portion of the university’s student body also come from low-income families — more than 40% of students in 2024 qualified for federal Pell Grants, according to data from CEHE. Those grants subsidize higher education for students living in poverty.
Since those are also the students who will show up in greater numbers in future high school classes, the university’s demographics set it on a more stable path to withstand overall declines in high school graduates, Tandberg said.
“I do think there’s going to be more competition, though, for those students and all students, both within Colorado and nationally, and so in that regard the decline does likely increase that competition,” he said. “What I would hope is that higher ed doesn’t focus on competing for that 50% that’s already going to college and more on, how do we break in better and serve the 50% that hasn’t been going and get them to go? That’s increasing the pie.”
Adams State has continued to unlock new ways to change the minds of students who might assume college isn’t an option for them, many of whom live in the San Luis Valley. The university directly admits every high school senior living in the valley along with students from nearby Huerfano County, regardless of their family’s income or their grade point average. Students must simply graduate with a high school diploma or GED and send over their transcript.
The number of kids from the valley attending Adams State has been on the rise, jumping to 693 undergraduates last fall from 374 undergraduates in fall 2022, according to figures provided by the university.
The university is expanding its direct admissions to Adams County School District 14, in Commerce City, where during the last school year more than 83% of students qualified for free and reduced-price lunch, a federal measure of poverty.
Adams State also covers tuition and fees for any Colorado student whose family earns $70,000 or less.
“There is no reason with investment, effort by institutions, high schools, the state, that we should have such a low high school-to-college going rate,” Tandberg said. “It’s the problem and the solution where it sets us back and we should have been doing better all along, but we can do better.”
Leaders at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, where 43% of students are the first in their family to pursue a degree, are optimistic enrollment for the university’s incoming class will stay flat.
The institution is keeping one eye on demographic changes and enrollment trends and is equally concerned about making sure the students who show up to campus leave with a certification or degree in hand, according to Lien, UNC’s associate vice president for enrollment management.
“You can’t just continue to do the same things you’ve always done and expect students to find success,” he said. “You have to do right by your students and constantly assess whether or not you’re meeting their needs and their expectations and supporting them.
“This isn’t about getting 600 more new first-time students to join in the fall. It’s about keeping all 600 of those students if you get them through graduation. And if you’re not doing that, then you’re failing as an institution.”
UNC has also turned more attention toward catering its programs to more than just 18-year-olds, Lien said.
“The future student is going to be more diverse, more likely to transfer, more likely to be balancing work and family responsibilities and more likely to engage with higher education at multiple points throughout their life cycle, not just coming out of high school,” Lien said.
It’s an approach that community colleges have fine tuned, long tailoring their programs to the needs of their students and communities in the way more four-year institutions are contemplating.
That’s one of the big reasons why Marielena DeSanctis, chancellor of the Colorado Community College System, said she isn’t panicking about the future of enrollment across the system’s 13 colleges, which open their doors to students of different ages and life stages.
“Our community colleges were built for this,” DeSanctis said. “We have thought about our student body in a very inclusive and diverse way for many, many years. I think, if anything, community colleges now have moved from an era in which we were focused simply on being open access and simply on completion and more towards economic mobility.”
It’s much more critical to focus on preparing students to springboard into a long-lasting career than tallying the number of diplomas institutions hand out, she added.
Meanwhile, the demand for learning is only accelerating, DeSanctis said. She wonders whether colleges and universities will be able to keep up with the ever-changing learning needs of students as they prepare for an ever-evolving workforce.
It’s what she calls “a transformation problem,” one that raises questions about whether higher education can break out of its old-school ways of learning.
Can schools start thinking about education in shorter terms? How does learning extend beyond Mondays through Thursdays 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.? What do round-the-clock support services for learners also holding a job look like?
“If I worry about anything, it’s can we transform ourselves at a speed that learners and the workforce are demanding of us?” DeSanctis said. “Can we transform as quickly as the world is transforming?”