If you are entering your junior or senior year of high school and hope to attend a selective college, we have some bad news for you. Getting into top colleges might get a whole lot harder in the next few years, as the number of prime college-age applicants in the U.S. is about to reach a generational peak.
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 4.5 million people will be 17 — the typical age for entering senior year — at the beginning of the 2024 and 2025 school years, up from between 4.3 and 4.4 million over the previous five years. This means that for the next few college cycles, there will be more total eligible students that can apply — potentially intensifying competition. The number will drop quickly in the years after 2025.
This will impact those who are applying to highly competitive schools the most. Students applying to non-competitive colleges, which admit more people and have less rigid requirements, are less likely to be impacted.
When the population of high school seniors bulges, competition to get into selective colleges becomes “fiercer” because these schools are selecting from a much larger pool of qualified applicants, said Angel Perez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
California is seeing a similar jump in the number of seniors. In 2024 and 2025, Census Bureau numbers show there could be around 525,000 kids that will be 17 at the start of the school year. That’s higher than any recent year but 2022. California will also see a precipitous decline in senior-age students after 2025.
The projections do not take into account those who will immigrate to the United States. However, “most first-generation immigrants come too late to make a meaningful bump in traditional age enrollments,” according to Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College who has written a book on how demographic shifts are likely to affect the demand for higher education.
The current bulge in 17-year-olds can be traced back to the baby boom that occurred in 2007, according to Peace Bransberger, a senior research analyst at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Experts point to the Great Recession to explain why birth rates fell quickly after 2007.
So will it get easier to get into selective colleges for students in the late 2020s and 2030s who are part of smaller cohorts? Not necessarily, experts say. That’s partially because these schools don’t need to let in students who don’t meet their standards just to get tuition dollars.
Highly selective colleges — for example, those within the Ivy League — depend mostly on endowments, rather than tuition dollars, for their finances, said Perez. These institutions have more agency to reduce the number of students they admit according to population changes.
Colleges that are more dependent on tuition to function will likely be hit harder by the decline in students, Perez added. Around 70% of colleges and universities in the United States admit a majority of the students who apply for admission, according to Perez. Those schools' finances may be hit by a lack of students, and forced to shut down programs.
Grawe of Carleton College pointed out that the share of young people attending college may rise, and that will counteract the declining population of college-age students. That could help most schools keep up their attendance numbers, and allow competitive schools to maintain selectivity without reducing class sizes.