Report: As fertility rate declines, so will Utah’s college-age population
A statue of the University of Utah logo is pictured on campus in Salt Lake City on Monday, January 15, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
Utah's college-age population is expected to decline in the coming years, which could impact enrollment and revenue at the state's public universities, according to a new from the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
The report, released Thursday, comes amid a 17-year stretch of growth among Utahns ages 18 to 24 years old, ramping up after 2018. From 2016 to 2022, the college-age population grew by nearly 5%.
That mostly mirrors national trends — but according to U.S. Census Bureau projections, the college-age population around the country is expected to fall by nearly 3.5 million starting in 2024, forecasted to hit a low point in 2044 which could possibly persist until 2060.
Utah's dip is expected to be a few years behind the national decline. Growth among the college-age population will start to slow over the next few years, then decline in 2032. By 2044, those numbers could bottom out, rebounding in the years that follow.
Generally, in the U.S. and Utah, people have been having fewer kids since the 1960s, and the report suggests that trend is to blame for the declining college-age population. Rates stabilized starting in the 1990s and into the 2000s, but during the great recession, the total fertility rate — defined as the average number of children a woman will give birth to during her life — dropped again.
In 2008, the nationwide fertility rate was 2.07. In 2022, it was 1.66.
Utah has long had a higher fertility rate than the rest of the country, but is witnessing a similar decline per capita, going from 2.65 in 2008 to 1.85 in 2022.
Soon, students born after 2008 will start their college careers. And the data suggests there will be less of them. According to the report, those declines "will likely create challenges for Utah institutions to maintain enrollment levels if the status quo continues."
The decline could have an outsized impact on two of Utah's larger institutions — about 71% of students at the University of Utah and 66% at Utah State University are ages 18 to 24. At the state's smaller, regional schools like Southern Utah, Weber State and Utah Valley universities, that population makes up around 40% to 50% of the student body. Technical schools will be the least impacted, with about 35% of the population consisting of that age group.
"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, in a statement. "State and institutional policymakers can proactively adopt strategies to transform, conserve, and realign to strategically position Utah higher education."
The report offers a few suggestions for Utah's higher education institutions, calling for a focus on high school graduate and older student enrollment rates, while trying to attract "the best and brightest researchers, faculty, and students from ailing national institutions to leapfrog others amid national contraction."
The report also recommends universities get ahead of the decline by creating a "budget buffer" and limiting new hires.
And, universities could consider "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."
