The public schools should have much more support from state governments to ensure they can stay relevant. For Syracuse, being private means they have a lot less room for error in how they approach this issue. ** Edited by HokieAl at 6/15/2026, 8:53:24 AM

Taxpayers won't be thrilled about floating the cost of operating universities that aren't sustainable. Big challenge for all schools is offering legitimate ROI in an AI-dominated world. Gone are the days of kids taking out six figures in student loans to spend four years to get a "check the box" bachelor's degree at a college, whether it's public or private. Flagship public schools like UVA and VT probably won't feel much effect, but I wouldn't want to be calling the shots at ODU or Longwood right now.

Big cities still draw kids. Private schools in big cities like DC, Miami, Dallas, LA, etc will have better luck in my opinion.

Many lesser-known private and state schools have shut down or merged. There are a lot of reasons for this, some internal and some external. This will have an effect on conference realignment I'm sure. Attracting students in a diminishing market will be a challenge.

known about this demographic cliff for 15+ years and haven’t done anything about it: administrative bloat, useless programs, no real controls on spending etc. Some of the Ivies have a 1:1 student/administrator ratio, that’s nuts

the party going for quite awhile longer. They will be the last ones standing. Living on other people's money.

about knowing about the cliff. Also there is merit in continuously evaluating program metrics and their fit with and contribution to university goals and results. Every organization needs financial controls to not only monitor and regulate spending but also to assess revenues, both use and stability. That being said at least some of the bloat is likely attributable to red tape of programs and bureaucratic regulation, both federal and state.

worth it. For that kind of money, they may as well just go straight to work out of high school and take community college classes. Is this right? No. But, this is what we were always going to end up with when we decided to give people infinite money with no collateral to go to higher ed - of course the universities are going to say, "oh wow, the government just gives people infinite money with no security backing to go to school, let's make school 25x more expensive!" I graduated from college a little over 20 years ago, and even at the cheap public school I attended, cost of attendance is almost 4x the sticker price when I graduated. If you go to private school like W&L, it's going to run you ~120-130k to get an UNDERGRAD degree. It's absolutely insane. Everyone wants to argue left this and right that, but let me tell you the real problem with this country, and why everything seems so out-of-whack: we decided at some point that we were just going to let everything, and I mean every single aspect about living in our country turn into a completely unregulated pyramid scheme designed to steal everybody's money. Case in point - remember when we used to have little league baseball? Yeah, now that's only for poor people - if you're a real man, you pay for $15k a season travel ball teams and another $2k of equipment for your 7 year old to bat .025 at coach pitch. Higher education is no different - what used to cost $12k a year now has to cost $40k a year, and, who cares? If you don't have it, here, just sign on the dotted line, it's all taken care of, don't worry about paying it back...what, are you NOT going to go to college? You'll be poor forever!

...people go along with them. If they weren't making money, they wouldn't exist. I think the real issue is that Americans are addicted to feeling instant gratification, which often goes along with being willing to pay for the perception of "buying the best". If consumers would be smarter with money, these types of money pit programs wouldn't exist.

of kids with a $100K debt, payments starting in 6 months, and can't get a job to save their lives...it will only take one year of this to destroy the colleges. Why? I just asked Grok, "what is the estiamted number of students who have or will borrower money for undergrad degree in the US, for the classes of 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030? " It said,"Roughly 1.1–1.5 million students per graduating class (2027–2030) are estimated to borrow for their undergraduate degree" Note that was per graduating class so let's call it 5million in the undergrad system now. Grok then said, "If comparing 5M unique borrowers to total annual enrollment: ~30% (5M / ~16.5M). This treats the borrowers as a share of a typical yearly snapshot of all undergrads." So we are looking at 30% of people start to seriously question the ROI of this. I think the schools are in deep deep doodoo. They have been growing expenses at X% per year, where X is large and now they have to deal with a large drop(my estimate) in enrollment. They are gonna be hurtin.

This from a recent Forbes article assigning financial grades. In 2016, their enrollment was 2700, and last year it was 1200. The board of course disputes the severity of it. Tuition, room and board is close to $60k. Mike Rowe has essays, videos, interviews galore about trade jobs vs. jobs after college.