Anticipated ‘enrollment cliff’ Coming Fall 2026

A national “enrollment cliff” is expected to affect university enrollment for the 2026-27 school year at institutions across the country due to a decline in national birthrates during the 2007-2009 recession, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Despite the anticipated drop in enrollment, which was previously reported on by The Phoenix, Loyola officials plan to continue working to attract prospective students to the university through university events such as Loyola Weekend and Scholars’ Night at the Field Museum, according to Provost and Chief Academic Officer Douglas Woods.

“Our goal is to keep working to mitigate the declines we’ll likely see because of the demographic shift to see if we can make up in other areas,” Woods said. “What we need to work on is once we get them to apply, how do we get them to come here.”

Loyola receives some of the highest numbers of applications in the country. Persuading students to commit to Loyola is a combined effort between Loyola as a whole and their various schools, according to Woods.

Although the class size for the 2026-27 academic year won’t be confirmed until May 1, Loyola has already seen a decline in programs which typically take international students due to is becoming more difficult for students to acquire visas in the United States, Woods said.

Many students who had plans to study in the U.S. could not enter the country because of difficulty lining up visas, according to the Associated Press.

One way the university can be more intentional about maintaining enrollment is by offering online courses only when they are the most effective method for student learning, according to Dean of the School of Communications Virginia McDermott.

Students are able to get the best course-specific learning experiences by prioritizing the modalities that work best for each course, McDermott said.

“Online classes were kept at a lot of universities after COVID-19, but that led with a sense of convenience and not a sense of what might be best for the student experience,” McDermott said.

The need to work harder to maintain student enrollment is an area Loyola should prioritize, which will only benefit current and incoming students, according to McDermott.

“I see this as a positive thing,” McDermott said. “When you realize you have to get better at what you do, it makes you be really creative and intentional with your resources.”

Universities across the United States are seeing the effects almost 20 years after the Great Recession through campus closures, lost revenue and regional labor shortages, according to National Public Radio. 

Enrollment in graduate schools has also dropped by 2.7 million students since the start of the last decade, according to The Hechinger Report.

Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Wayne Magdziarz said the expected erosion in the size of the incoming first-year class encourages Loyola to be more competitive with scholarship price points.

“We try to make sure we put the best possible package out in front of the student from the very beginning,” Magdziarz said. “But there are restrictions on some scholarships and endowments that we can’t spend.”

Philanthropy from Loyola’s scholarship donors will be an important aspect in keeping the scholarships Loyola offers to ensure unrestricted endowment funds are replenished, according to Magdziarz.

Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs and Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Economics Timothy Classen, said the decline in enrollment can have an effect on Loyola’s economics.

Revenue will become increasingly thinner and the university will need to expand financial aid offerings in response to this, The Phoenix previously reported.

“We are tuition dependent, and so if there is a decline in incoming students by 10 or 15 percent, this can have a big effect on our economic model as a university,” Classen said. “We’re unable to wait out a decline drawing from our endowment, we don’t have the kind of endowment to be able to do that.”

The shifts in attitude toward higher education may also play a role in enrollment numbers, according to Classen.

The proportion of high school students enrolling directly in college fell by 8.6% from 2016 to October 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

The percentage of college enrollment increased in Fall 2025 due to a peak in high school graduates, which is now projected to steadily decline until 2041, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

Along with the birth decline, the “enrollment cliff” is affected by other factors, according to the Chair of Finance Department Abol Jalilvand.

“Enrollment issues are also a function of other variables, specifically economic situation and job market availability,” Jalilvand. “If there is going to be a cliff, my view is that it won’t be a very deep one, because there are lots of factors outside of the demographic.”

Geopolitical relations and economic factors, like inflation and tariffs may also contribute to a decrease in enrollment, Jalilvand said. The introduction of artificial intelligence to the job market may also change the type of jobs available to graduates.

The demographic shift from the decline in birth rates during the Great Recession also affects how Loyola approaches enrollment, since the university primarily attracts students from the Midwest, according to Woods.

“This means we probably have to think about our strategy moving forward,” Woods said. “We need to think about how we’ll move to areas where they’re seeing slight growth of high school age students wanting to go to college.”

As Chicago’s Jesuit Catholic university, Loyola has a key advantage to drawing students in and appealing to them through the Jesuit values expressed in their mission statement, according to McDermott.

“Students don’t just end up at Loyola,” McDermott said. “To me, Loyola is an intentional choice for our students. They come here because they want something very particular in the experience.”