News Release

October 3, 2024 (Salt Lake City) – Utah’s population continues to grow, age, and diversify. A new report from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute shows that compared to national declines beginning in 2025, the state’s college-age population is projected to begin decreasing in 2032 and decline for over a decade before rebounding. If current approaches remain unchanged, this demographic dip will impact enrollment and revenues at Utah’s eight public colleges and universities, as well as eight technical colleges.

“Utah can maximize the opportunities and minimize the challenges created by the change in college-age population by planning and acting now,” said Andrea Brandley, senior education analyst at the Gardner Institute. “State and institutional policymakers can proactively adopt strategies to transform, conserve, and realign to strategically position Utah higher education.”

Key findings from the report include the following:

College-age population decline – Nationally, the traditional college-age population will decline beginning in 2025, as those born during the Great Recession reach traditional college age. Utah’s dip occurs later, with projections showing deceleration beginning in 2027 and a 12-year stretch of decline starting in 2032. This shift follows 17 years of expansion in Utah’s college-age population and will likely impact enrollment trends.

Enrollment impacts – National college-age population declines, expected to begin earlier and last longer than Utah’s projected dips, will intensify enrollment competition for a limited pool of traditional college-age students. These national trends, along with Utah’s own college-age population declines, will likely create challenges for Utah institutions to maintain enrollment levels if the status quo continues.

Strategic response options – State and institutional policymakers contemplating these pending demographic changes can position Utah advantageously by adopting strategies to proactively transform, conserve, and realign.

• Transform – Transformation strategies include leaning into a systemwide mission-based focus, aggressively improving student retention and completion, increasing high school graduate and older student enrollment rates, and attracting the best and brightest researchers, faculty, and students from ailing national institutions to leapfrog others amid national contraction.
• Conserve – Conservation strategies include creating sufficient budget buffers to manage limited or declining enrollment growth, limiting new hires as enrollment stagnates, and maximizing the use of existing facilities over new facility construction.
• Realign – Realignment strategies include rearranging cost structures to align with any enrollment declines by downsizing and even closing struggling programs, reducing facility footprints when feasible, and reducing staff through natural attrition or other means.

“As state and higher education policymakers look to Utah’s future, pending demographic shifts provide an opportunity to re-evaluate existing service delivery approaches to ensure they evolve to meet Utahns’ critical needs,” said Gardner Institute chief economist Phil Dean. “A robust and market-aligned higher education system that innovates and prepares our future workforce remains a critical driver of Utah’s future economic prosperity.”

The full report is now available online.

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