Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Sign up, and get your own copy of the news that matters sent to your inbox every week. Sign up for the On EdTech newsletter. Interested in additional analysis? Upgrade to the On EdTech+ newsletter.

Last week the big news in US higher education was the release of National Student Clearinghouse’s (NSC’s) preliminary Fall 2026 enrollment data.

Accordingly, this news was presented in the media.

The coverage reports the slowdown. The larger question is what that slowdown marks. Taking a broader look at trends and looking at age composition shows some different headlines. My read is that 2026 marks the transition from the post-pandemic recovery toward renewed enrollment decline. Whether this fall ultimately finishes slightly positive or slightly negative is secondary to the direction of travel.

While this reading is much more negative in outlook than the public reports, it is important to deal with the data reality we are given. For this post I’m focusing just on undergraduate data, with three observations.

Higher ed undergraduate enrollments tend to move in multi-year trends, and if you look at the past 15 years, you can see a few distinct time frames.

The precise turning year matters less than the end of the recovery and the conditions institutions will face afterward. We need to be ready for this decline, which has been predicted for a long time.

The “cliff” part of the demographic cliff argument has too often been overstated, but the core argument from Nathan Grawe is important. Demographic analysis on domestic births and enrollment shows a long-term decline in domestic 18-year-olds ready to enter college, starting in 2025/26 and likely going through 2039.

The decline in childbirths began with the Great Recession in roughly 2008, and 18 years later, here we are. Adult student populations, increases in immediate college enrollments, and better retention rates can offset these numbers, but absent a massive change in those numbers, they can only dampen the impacts of the decline.

WICHE’s Knocking at the College Door data series has tracked these numbers, and their latest forecast shows the decline in harder numbers.

Here you can see the peak in 2025 and the long-term expected decline of high school graduates.

High school dual enrollment, roughly captured by NSC as those 17 years or younger, increased yet again, by 3.9%. No other age group came close. The demographic pressure arrives through entering cohorts and then works through the enrolled population over several years. Aggregate enrollment need not immediately turn negative for that pressure to matter.

The Community College Research Center (CCRC) estimates roughly 3.1 million dual enrollment students. 3.9% of that is roughly 120,000. The NSC-reported 0.6% gain of the roughly 16.6 million total undergraduates is roughly 100,000.

Without dual enrollment gains, total undergraduate enrollments would already be in decline. And keep in mind that dual enrollment is a pull-forward effect—these students will not be new undergraduates when they graduate; they are already in the numbers.

There have been worthwhile improvements in student retention, graduation rates, and expanding access to adult students. Those are all important and should continue. And it is important to note that aggregate growth or decline rates are not distributed equally—there will be winners and losers in terms of institutions and geographic locations.

But at the end of the day, I think there are some important trends we are seeing with recent enrollment data that can be hidden by the ‘enrollment is steady’ narrative. Institutions should keep improving access and retention. But they should build their enrollment assumptions around a recovery that is running out of momentum. Finishing slightly above zero in Fall 2026 would offer little reassurance about the years ahead.

The main On EdTech newsletter is free to share in part or in whole. All we ask is attribution.

Thanks for being a subscriber.