Dear Lynx community,

Last Thursday, senior leadership shared an update on our fall 2026 enrollment and its impact on our FY 2026-27 budget. For those who may have missed the message, overall student headcount is 1.4% lower than it was at the start of the 2025-26 academic year, creating an approximate $8.4 million budget gap. If you have not yet, I encourage you to take a moment to read the complete message and take time to explore the enrollment dashboard, which can be sorted by demographic makeup, school/college, major, and more.

For the past 18 months, I have emphasized the need to evolve how we approach enrollment, retention, and student success with greater intention and urgency. The shift we have been anticipating is no longer imminent, it is here and it is reshaping higher education in fundamental, and likely permanent, ways.

Much of the conversation has focused on the enrollment cliff—the forecast that there will be 13% fewer 18 year olds nationwide in 2041 than there were in 2025. But cliff is a misleading way to describe what lies ahead, as its effects will vary by region and institution. What we are experiencing is better understood, in my opinion, as a realignment.

The Northeast and Midwest are among the regions expected to experience the sharpest decreases in high school graduates. Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania are projected to see a drop of more than 20%, further stressing institutions already facing enrollment challenges.

In contrast, many universities in the South are experiencing enrollment growth driven by domestic migration, changing student preferences, and targeted recruitment. Nine of the 17 southern states are projected to gain high school graduates or remain flat, with significant growth projected in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Florida.

Colorado and the West are not facing drops as sharp as those expected in the Northeast or Midwest, but are entering a period of net decline that will continue for the foreseeable future. The latest projections forecast a 12% decline in 18 year olds in Colorado over the next 15 years.

Although CU Denver grew last year, many of our peers across Colorado experienced declines, which resulted in budgetary shortfalls. Others were impacted by decreases in state funding.

This year, the shift has reached us. In addition to the challenges of declining domestic demographics, lower-than-expected nonresident enrollment, particularly from abroad, also contributed significantly to our decline. An estimated 112,000 fewer international students are expected to enroll in the United States this year, representing as much as $3.4 billion in lost revenue. Since fall 2024, our new nonresident enrollment has declined by 37.7%, with new enrollments from abroad declining by 62.6%. This is dramatic and particularly challenging given that three resident enrollments are required to fill the gap of each lost nonresident enrollment.

I am not alone among higher education leaders in believing that this decline is not an episodic downturn, but part of a sustained shift in international enrollment patterns that will continue, and may deepen, in the years ahead. All of this is also unfolding alongside an ongoing slide in domestic public sentiment, with just one-third of Americans believing a four-year college degree is worth the cost and only 35% viewing college as very important, a decline of 40 percentage points since 2010.

Much of what is driving these trends is out of our control and I do not expect them to simply self-correct or reverse because of a change in policy or administration. The time has come to accept that the landscape has changed. 

Given this reality, we must focus our time, effort, and resources on things that we can control. We must continue to evolve where we recruit learners, what we offer them, how we support their success, and how we generate the recurring revenue necessary to sustain the learner experience.

As I’ve shared in messages throughout the summer, I see five areas of particular importance: 

• One-time resources should be used to create sustainable recurring revenue streams that can be reinvested over time. While using one-time funds to address immediate needs or backstop recurring costs may provide short-term relief, it does not solve the underlying challenge. We should instead continue to strategically use one-time resources to create and support new recurring revenue streams. This is the thinking behind Independence Plaza​, which will not only expand learner access to internships, employment pathways, and career-connected learning, but will also create new avenues for growth through employer and industry partnerships, business co-location, and by providing programs with current physical space constraints the opportunity to expand and grow their enrollments.
  
• We must continue to prioritize local learners. At census, across our first three CU Denver Direct partners, Denver, Aurora, and Jeffco, applications were up 8%, admits were up 10%, and new enrollments were up 12% compared to last fall. These positive trends are helping address Colorado’s lagging rate of high school graduates who go directly to college. This is increasingly important as the state’s longstanding population dynamics change. Colorado has historically been a net importer of college graduates, but the state is no longer attracting new residents at the rate it once did. Over the past decade, Colorado has fallen from third to 44th for domestic migration. This reality also reinforces the need to prioritize localized lifelong learning, including targeted opportunities for working adults, continuing education and certifications, cohort-based programs, and industry partnerships. I have advocated that lifelong learning should represent 25% of our recurring revenue. Today, it is less than 10%.
  
• Continue to pursue new markets and act with intention to reach learners in new ways. Our exploration in India is emblematic of this approach. Rather than relying solely on students to relocate to Denver, we are pursuing a regional hub in Hyderabad that would create new pathways for learners across India and Southeast Asia to connect with CU Denver. If realized, we would be the first domestic university to establish this type of presence in Hyderabad, putting CU Denver out in front of a changing global higher education marketplace.​​​​​​​
  
• Deepen investments in learner retention, building on the success of the past two years. We are now retaining more students than we have historically. The work we have undertaken through our Student Success Transformation Initiative continues to transform how we support students throughout their educational journey and we must accelerate our work in this space to keep pace with the changing enrollment landscape. This has included improving our ability to track and understand DFWI (D and F grades, withdraw, or incomplete) rates, as well as work to unify our university-wide advising strategy. We must also ensure that financial constraints do not unnecessarily derail a student’s path to a degree. This will require that we identify new ways to make a CU Denver education more affordable for learners.​​​​​​​
  
• Complement revenue growth with a sustainable philanthropic strategy. Philanthropy is an essential component of how we will invest in our learners and expand CU Denver’s capacity. The recent $3.25 million commitment from the Reisher Scholars Program is one such example where philanthropy is directly contributing to the continued growth of the university. ELEVATION our first comprehensive campus campaign, is creating more opportunity to build on this momentum. Its focus on access, student success, and human talent aligns directly with our 2030 Strategic Plan Refresh.

We cannot control every force shaping higher education, but we can control how we respond and where we choose to focus our efforts—supporting local learners, creating clearer pathways from high school to college to employment, exploring new markets to increase our reach, and working more closely with employers and community partners to ensure what we teach keeps pace with what our region needs.

I have spoken often on the idea of staying true to the moment. This moment requires us to be clear about what matters most, what we must preserve, and where we must be willing to change and evolve. We have no choice but to meet this moment head on so that we can shape what comes next. If we wait to react, not only will we be forced to invest more time to catch up, but the consequences for the ground we will have lost will be greater—and potentially insurmountable.

I have every confidence in our commitment and resiliency as a campus to weather this storm and am excited about the good things that lie ahead.