The Higher Education Apocalypse - Lauren Camera, US News

Some forecasters, including famed Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, predict as many as half of all universities will close or go bankrupt in the next decade. The crisis is largely driven by declining enrollment facilitated by the Great Recession, which resulted in a significant drop in the U.S. birthrate. Scholars estimate that nearly 2.3 million fewer babies were born between 2008 and 2013, which, when combined with an expansion of higher education offerings in the decades preceding that, mean too many slots compared to the number of applicants. Economist Nathan Grawe, who coined the term "birth dearth" in his 2017 book, "Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education," estimates that the number of students graduating from high school in New England who are then likely to enroll in four-year colleges and universities will be 24 percent lower in 2029 than it was in 2012. https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-03-22/college-closings-signal-start-of-a-crisis-in-higher-education