Warren Wilson College Prepares For 2026 Demographic Shift
Jasper Everingham | November 8, 2023
In the world of higher education, changes are coming. A shift in demographics in the U.S. is leading to fewer college-age students in 2026 than almost any other year. It is known by a number of names — demographic shift, dip and cliff are the most common monikers — but at the end of the day, the effect is the same: this shift in students is going to represent a new challenge for Warren Wilson College (WWC).
“[The demographic shift] is a gonna represent about an eight to ten percent drop in the population of 18 to 21-year-olds who are going to college,” Jay Roberts said, the provost of WWC. “It's going to be a much more competitive kind of landscape for a place like Warren Wilson.”
Ben Feinberg, a professor of cultural anthropology at WWC, noted that the cause of the 2026 demographic shift is directly linked to the 2008 financial recession. He said that during the financial instability following the 2008 recession, fewer people had children, creating a population drop that has worked its way through society ever since.
“In 2008, there was the Great Recession,” Feinberg said. “What happened was that people stopped having children and they never really started again. Throughout the country, the peak number of students entering college was in 2010. It's slowly declined [since then], but of course, 18 years forward from 2008 is 2026, which is really coming up in just three years. That's the date that people have been looking at.”
“It's gotten everybody's attention,” Roberts said, likening the college’s finances to those of a household. “Even in your family income, you take out 10% of your income and all of a sudden, you know, how are you going to make that work? Everybody's going to be competing for a smaller subset of students.”
However, that is not to say that 2026 will bring an apocalyptic shift by any means, and there are several mitigating factors. Bob Nesmith, the vice president of enrollment at WWC, said that one factor is location and that not all areas of the country are equally affected by the change. Nesmith said areas like New England and the industrial Midwest are already starting to experience “crashing” declines in college-age students, while the west and parts of the Southeast are more stable.
“The places that are really going to have a hard time, I think, are bigger places with highly regional populations [like] regional public universities,” Nesmith said. “If I'm Southern Illinois University, I’m in full-on panic mode about the demographic cliff because I'm already being hit by it. I have no national reputation, I have no national reach, and I am very dependent on a local population that's shrinking rapidly. That’s trouble.”
Nesmith said that WWC, on the other hand, is very geographically diverse.
“We have students from 45 states,” Nesmith said. “We do national recruitment. We have a pretty diffuse market, so to speak, and I think that having geographic diversity at times when some places are growing and some places are shrinking helps insulate us a little bit.”
Another consideration is the makeup of WWC’s student body. Roberts said that one way WWC is trying to draw more students is by increasing student athletics.
“We were only about at 18 to 20 percent student-athlete, and when you compare us to similar small liberal arts schools of our size, those schools typically are between 30 and 40 percent student-athlete,” Roberts said. “We felt like there was an opportunity for us to grow in some sports and have opportunities for students to experience more sports here. And so students are probably aware, we added men's and women's volleyball, we added women's rugby, we added track and field. And we're beginning to see that those added sports are helping our enrollment.”
Nesmith also spoke to the financial reality of attending college, saying that future high school graduates are predicted to need more assistance than in previous years.
“We do a pretty incredible job already with financial aid in terms of the number of high-needs students we enrolled,” Nesmith said. “I mean, everybody's getting some aid — that's the nature of the work program — and we've doubled down on that with every incoming new student getting a work scholarship, in addition to the work grant. Our NC free plan has really opened the door for a kind of socio-economic diversity here that wasn't necessarily there 20 years ago, and I think it's important that we continue to be accessible to students.”
A broader theme that connects to need-based aid, the geographic diversity of WWC’s students and the student population more generally is the community and culture of WWC. Roberts said that the experiential nature of WWC is something that the college values highly and is planning on doubling down on in the face of the 2026 demographic change, adding that those values are reflected in the student body as well.
“We've had a couple different meetings and a survey that went out to students,” Roberts said. “We've been working on the faculty and staff, and that process is reaching its conclusion. It's going to essentially create more opportunities for experiential learning for our students. We feel like that is a real strength of Warren Wilson, so leaning into the work program and our work college identity, more opportunities for significant work placements, and work program experiences for students having more opportunities for project and place-based learning across the curriculum and every major. We're really trying to lean into that part of our identity: we think that that's one of the reasons why students choose to come to Warren Wilson in the first place.”
Feinberg agreed with that sentiment and added that many colleges have turned towards online learning as a way to broaden their student base in the face of this demographic change and that he is grateful for WWC’s continued emphasis on tangible, experiential education.
“I think what Warren Wilson represents is the value of the opposite of that [virtual learning]: the value of that personal connection, of being together in our living physical bodies, and how that can’t really be substituted in terms of what you get out of community and what you get out of education,” Feinberg said. “So as we face this tenuous situation with declining numbers of college-age students, I think it's time to refocus on the value of the kinds of things that you do here.”