Missing Freshmen

In the spring of 2025, American high schools graduated the largest class in the nation's history, about 3.9 million young people. Almost all of them were born in 2007, the year the United States recorded more births than in any year before it. Everyone who comes after them comes in smaller numbers. The Missing Freshmen follows that smaller generation as it reaches eighteen, beginning with the high school class of 2026, and tracks what its thinness does to the colleges built for its older brothers and sisters. William Liu explains the so-called enrollment cliff in plain terms, shows why the shape is not quite a cliff, and maps where the loss lands first, from the Northern Tier to the regions that will hold steady. You will meet the economist who saw it coming, learn why discounting tuition becomes a trap, see how researchers count the colleges at risk, and understand how a college actually dies, from the first missed enrollment target to the last commencement. Later chapters cover mergers, rescues and takeovers, students stranded mid-degree, what happens to a town when its college leaves, the reckoning facing faculty, and how states are stepping in. This is a book for parents and students weighing a school, for trustees, administrators and faculty living through the squeeze, and for anyone who wants to know what the birth dearth means for higher education. It is smaller, not gone, and the colleges that understand why will decide which of them make it.