Here is a statistic that makes admissions deans at liberal arts colleges shudder: Between 2019 and 2022, undergraduate enrollment
fell eight percent
. It’s a frightening decline for those schools that have small endowments and depend on tuition to operate year to year. When one of those schools comes up twenty kids short of its typical entering class of 250, layoffs, cutbacks, or restructuring and downsizing could be next. It’s going to get worse in the coming years, too: Fertility dropped after the 2008 financial crisis, so the next cohort of college-age kids will be smaller.