Students are suffering from US colleges’ shaky finances. Trump policies are making everything worse
Many four-year colleges will resort to laying off faculty, cutting services and increasing prices amid financial stress Nalia Mutz started her freshman year at the University of Lynchburg in 2022 knowing exactly where she wanted to be four years later: right on track toward her dream of becoming a doctor. When the university eliminated a dozen majors in 2024, the resulting layoffs left fewer professors to teach the science courses she needed to graduate. She began to fear earning her biomedicine degree the way she had planned could take two extra years. Roughly 1,100 out of the 1,900 colleges in our dataset experienced enrollment drops in three of the five years from 2019 to 2024, the most recent year for which data is available. About 6.4 million students attended these schools. About 1,500 colleges saw net revenue from tuition drop from 2019 to 2024. Roughly 960 institutions, enrolling 5.2 million students, had 75,600 fewer instructional staff in that period. Nearly 440 colleges and universities reported ending the financial year in the red in three of those five years. Continue reading...
Join the argument
House rules →Comments load as you scroll.