When growth becomes redistribution

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Higher education has spent decades treating enrollment growth as evidence of institutional success. Presidents are praised for adding students, programs, buildings, and geographic reach. “If we’re not growing, we’re dying,” one university president told researchers from the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS).

But what happens when the number of prospective students stops growing? In a stagnant or shrinking market, institutions cannot all maintain their enrollment by capturing a larger share. Growth becomes increasingly redistributive: one institution’s gain is more likely to produce losses elsewhere.

Two recent reports—one on American public higher education from NCHEMS and another on English universities from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI)—show what this looks like in practice. Higher education systems are, like it or not, stratified by prestige, selectivity, wealth, and recruiting power. That is a description of institutional position, not a judgment about educational quality or public value.

Better-resourced institutions expand into markets traditionally served by other colleges and universities. Institutions with less power in the hierarchy respond by adding programs, recruiting new student populations, or moving into the territory of still more vulnerable institutions.

Each decision may be rational for the institution that makes it. Collectively, however, these decisions can leave higher education systems more hierarchical, less stable, and less capable of serving students who depend on affordable and geographically accessible options.

The US: Enrollment moves up the hierarchy

NCHEMS released a policy brief with the Lumina Foundation describing how enrollment changes in the United States have shifted the roles played by different kinds of public institutions.

NCHEMS argues that the long period of enrollment growth allowed states to rely on competition and student choice to shape public higher education. When there were enough students to go around, expansion at one institution did not necessarily threaten others.

That assumption no longer holds. Public research universities generally possess greater visibility, stronger finances, and a wider recruiting reach than regional universities and community colleges. As demand softens, these advantages allow them to capture a growing share of students and public resources.

We see this most clearly in undergraduate enrollment. Enrollment at public research universities grew in 36 states—but in only six of those states did the public comprehensive sector also grow. Utah was the only state in which enrollment at comprehensive universities grew more than enrollment at research universities.

This was not, therefore, a shift confined to a few unusually competitive state systems. It was a widespread movement of enrollment toward public research universities.

Some of this change reflects the reclassification of 54 institutions from the comprehensive to the research category between 2013 and 2023. But NCHEMS argues that movement between the categories is itself evidence of mission convergence: institutions are not simply responding to enrollment pressures but also repositioning themselves within the hierarchy.

The problem is not that public research universities are growing or that students should be prevented from choosing them. It is that few states have mechanisms for determining whether that growth advances public priorities or strips enrollment and capacity from institutions with different but equally important missions.

Institutions facing these pressures seek new students and sources of revenue. Regional universities expand graduate education, recruit farther from home, or pursue research status.

Program portfolios are also being remade. Institutions across most sectors are simultaneously adding and eliminating large numbers of programs. Some of this activity reflects legitimate changes in student and workforce demand. But creating programs is also a strategy for attracting new student populations and entering markets historically served by other institutions.

The chart’s most striking feature is not simply the number of new programs but the scale of the churn. Institutions are committing resources to new offerings while eliminating others, even though research cited by NCHEMS suggests that relatively few newly launched programs become sustainable over the long term.

Taken together across a state, these individual program decisions can substantially alter institutional missions without anyone first determining whether the resulting mix of programs effectively serves students, communities, or workforce needs. Student choice may determine which institutions grow, but it cannot by itself ensure geographic access, an appropriate distribution of workforce programs, or adequate educational opportunities for populations whose participation in college is least assured.

The UK: England’s recruitment cascade

England provides a clearer view of how enrollment redistribution works and shows that it can begin even before demographic decline arrives. England’s population of 18-year-olds is expected to grow modestly until around 2030 and then fall substantially during the following decade. Yet institutions lower in the hierarchy are already losing ground.

A HEPI report, which I previously covered in On EdTech, shows that between 2016 and 2025, acceptances at higher-tariff universities—essentially, more selective institutions—grew by approximately 27 percent, compared with growth of about 7 percent across the sector. HEPI estimates that roughly 70 percent of the growth at higher-tariff institutions resulted not from expansion of the overall system but from the redistribution of students who, under earlier enrollment patterns, would probably have attended other universities.

This produces a cascade. Higher-tariff universities recruit further into the attainment range historically served by mid-tariff institutions. Those institutions respond by reaching further into the pool traditionally served by lower-tariff universities. Institutions at the bottom of the hierarchy experience the cumulative losses.

Demography helps determine the overall size of the student pool, but it does not determine which institutions bear the losses. Institutional power, recruitment behavior, and public policy help determine how those losses are distributed.

What does redistribution mean for student success?

Both reports recognize that system-level dynamics can affect students, but neither follows the argument very far into students’ experiences and outcomes. Neither provides direct evidence that redistribution has already worsened access, affordability, support, or completion. The implications discussed below should therefore be understood as risks that policymakers and institutions need to investigate, not as conclusively established effects.

What might happen when students and resources move up the institutional hierarchy?

Access is about more than the number of available seats

Institutions are not interchangeable suppliers of college places. NCHEMS finds that community colleges and regional universities draw far more heavily from nearby populations than research universities do. The median student travels 10 miles to attend a community college and 13 miles to attend a public bachelor’s or master’s institution, compared with 39 miles to attend a public research university.

Many community college students face constraints related to employment, income, caregiving, and transportation. If a rural or small-town community college weakens or closes, growth at a flagship hundreds of miles away does not replace the opportunity that was lost. A technically available college place is not meaningfully accessible if a student cannot afford to relocate, leave a job, or set aside family responsibilities.

Redistribution up the institutional hierarchy may also direct students toward more expensive options. Even when financial aid offsets some tuition differences, relocation, housing, and forgone earnings can make the total cost substantially higher, limiting access or imposing heavier debt burdens on students.

The support squeeze at both ends

Greater access to a more selective institution can benefit students, and admitting a broader range of applicants should not automatically be characterized as predatory. But recruiting students is not the same as supporting them through completion.

If an institution rapidly recruits students whose academic, financial, employment, or family circumstances differ from those of the populations it has traditionally served, its advising, scheduling, financial aid, and academic support systems must change accordingly. Without that investment, expanded access can create a gap between the students an institution admits and those it is designed to support.

At the same time, institutions that lose students also lose tuition revenue. They may reduce course sections, advising, tutoring, and student services precisely when their remaining students have substantial support needs. Redistribution therefore creates student-success risks at both ends: capacity strain at growing institutions and resource erosion at shrinking ones.

Program churn can create student risk

Institutions under pressure frequently respond by creating new programs and entering new markets. But expansion is not free. New programs consume startup funding, marketing capacity, faculty time, and leadership attention before they generate revenue—and some will never enroll enough students to cover their costs.

This can create a destructive cycle: enrollment loss produces a search for growth; the search for growth diverts resources from existing students; weaker services make retention more difficult; and declining retention adds to the original financial pressure.

Program churn also creates direct risks for students. When institutions close programs, students can face discontinued course sequences, changes in degree requirements, credits that no longer apply, delayed graduation, or pressure to transfer. Institutions may provide formal teach-out plans while still leaving students with fewer course options and less predictable routes to completion.

The student-success question is therefore not only whether a new program attracts students. It is also whether the institution can sustain that program long enough for its students to complete it—and protect them if the program closes.

Conventional success metrics can conceal system failure

Redistribution can also make institutional metrics misleading. Suppose students with stronger academic preparation move from regional universities to a flagship university. The flagship’s completion rate may remain high. But the regional university loses both enrollment and revenue while continuing to serve students with greater support needs, and its completion rate may fall.

Those numbers might appear to show that students have chosen the more successful institution. But some of the difference may reflect student sorting and resource redistribution rather than changes in educational quality.

We measure success institution by institution, even when the forces shaping it operate across an entire system.

Two reports, two policy responses

If redistribution threatens access, student support, and program continuity, allowing every institution to pursue growth independently is not an adequate response. NCHEMS and HEPI both argue for greater system-level intervention, but they differ over how far that intervention should go.

NCHEMS calls for states to manage the missions of public institutions more deliberately:

HEPI goes further, recommending institution-level recruitment caps intended to prevent higher-tariff universities from protecting their enrollment at the expense of the rest of the sector.

That proposal makes the underlying trade-off unusually visible. Protecting institutional diversity may require limiting some forms of expansion. But doing so could also restrict opportunities for students who would benefit from attending a more selective university.

A system problem needs a system response

Neither unrestricted competition nor rigid enrollment caps provide a satisfactory answer. The first allows individually rational decisions to produce damaging collective effects. The second risks becoming paternalistic—protecting institutions from competition, restricting student choice, and assuming that policymakers can determine in advance where students should enroll.

Individual institutions nevertheless have responsibilities. Leaders and governing boards should understand how their missions are changing, whether expansion is based on genuine new demand or the redistribution of existing students, and whether their support systems can serve the populations they are recruiting. Institutions losing enrollment must also examine how contraction, program closures, and service reductions affect the students who remain.

But institutional action is unlikely to be enough. Institutions are being asked to compete for students and revenue, and it is unrealistic to expect them to voluntarily sacrifice their own interests to preserve the health of the wider system. The central problem described by NCHEMS and HEPI is created by the interaction of institutional decisions, not simply by the failure of individual institutions to make better ones.

Nor is the problem necessarily a lack of policy tools. States and systems already conduct mission reviews, approve programs, develop strategic plans, collect extensive data, and make funding decisions. The problem is that these activities are often fragmented, weakly enforced, or focused on individual proposals rather than their cumulative effects. A new program may make sense for one institution while contributing to unnecessary duplication across a state. Enrollment growth may strengthen one university while undermining access and capacity elsewhere.

A system response does not require freezing institutional missions or assigning students to particular colleges. It does require making changes in enrollment, programs, and missions more explicit; evaluating their combined effects on students and communities; and judging institutional growth by more than the number of students recruited. Institutions pursuing new populations should be expected to demonstrate that they can support those students, while systems should pay closer attention to what is lost when other institutions weaken.

Meaningful student choice requires more than allowing students to apply anywhere. It also requires preserving viable, affordable options for students who cannot relocate or absorb higher costs. Governments cannot treat every enrollment decision as an isolated transaction and then act surprised when the combined result undermines access, institutional stability, and student success.

The answer is not to preserve every institution in its current form. It is to recognize that colleges and universities perform different public functions and that market competition alone will not necessarily preserve the functions students and communities need.

The enrollment cliff will not simply reduce the number of students in higher education. It will redistribute students, resources, and educational opportunity. Whether that redistribution advances student success—or leaves the most vulnerable students with fewer viable choices—will depend on whether policymakers continue to let the market drift or begin treating the system as a system.

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