Tech Trends 2025: Can Technology Help Universities Avoid the Enrollment Cliff?

Higher education institutions must invest in students to keep them interested in college.

“Seventeen years ago, the United States economy hit a rough patch and, for that reason and many others, Americans stopped having as many kids. The phenomenon became known as the birth dearth, and in the years that followed, the economy rebounded but birth rates did not.

The fertility rate in the United States reached a “historic low” in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the fertility rate dropped more than 22% from 2007 to 2020.

Fast-forward to today, and that first cadre of birth dearth-born American children are now high school upperclassmen about to make one of the biggest decisions of their young lives. Those who attend and graduate from college still earn more in their lifetimes than those who do not, and universities depend on turning students into alums and then into donors to keep their institutions economically viable.

The long-predicted enrollment cliff — a feature of the birth dearth wherein fewer high school graduates are available to fill college dorms, lecture halls and laboratories — is very real. A spate of university closures and a downward trend in overall enrollment have intensified fears about the consequences of the enrollment cliff, and most colleges have been preparing for this inevitability over the 17 years since 2008.”

Read more about how tech trends can help universities avoid enrollment challenges.