College Closure & Financial Distress Forecaster
Which colleges are most likely to close, and which will struggle to attract students as the high school graduating class begins to shrink in 2026? This model answers both questions for roughly 1,700 private nonprofit and public US four-year colleges. I estimate the odds of closing based on how often schools in similar situations closed since 1998. The demand grade, A+ to F, measures how well a school attracts students. Schools with an F are losing students, while those with A or A+ see the highest demand. For example, Northland College in Wisconsin was graded an F with odds of closure about 1 in 2, the second-highest of any college on the list. It closed in 2025. Syracuse, by contrast, earns an A with odds below 1 in 1,000. Detailed methodology can be found below.
Data through fall 2024 · Last updated September 2026
MethodologyHow we predict closure
The two models behind the odds, how they are tested without peeking, how their scores become odds, and the red-flag correction.
Read the methodsHow we assign grades
What goes into the A+ to F grade, where the letter cuts fall, the four red flags, and how the grade is checked against what happens to enrollment next.
Read the methodsData
The closure model runs on an institution-year panel of roughly 1,200 private nonprofit colleges from 1998 to 2024, assembled from IPEDS (via the Urban Institute API and raw NCES files), FSA/PEPS closure records, WICHE cohort projections, and Census demographics. Closure-versus-merger labels are hand-verified against roughly 20 known events, since the two look identical in most administrative data but mean very different things. The demand grades also cover about 580 public four-year colleges.
Results and caveats
The full model beats the Department of Education's own financial-responsibility score from public data alone: ROC 0.85 versus 0.71 on identical rows. Two caveats are worth stating. A two-variable benchmark, enrollment trend and tuition dependence, still wins in the extreme tail. And the demographic cliff is not yet detectable in closures through 2024 once calendar time is controlled for.
The pipeline is refreshable annually as new IPEDS data publishes, with a CLI that scores the live universe of institutions. Two of the model's 2024 top-50 highest-risk institutions, Fontbonne and Northland, closed in 2025, after the model's information window.