Education & the Work Force: The Buyer’s Market

The number every college president in the country has been watching finally arrived: 2025 marked the peak year for U.S. high school graduates, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, with the pipeline now in a projected multi-year decline as the smaller birth cohorts of the Great Recession era reach college age. The Midwest is projected to see roughly a 16 percent drop in graduating seniors over the period tracked by the commission. That’s not a distant forecast anymore. It’s this year’s incoming class, and every class after it for a while.

Missouri is already living the consequences. Fontbonne University in St. Louis, a fixture of the city’s higher-education landscape for nearly a century, announced its closure in 2025. William Woods University in Fulton posted its largest freshman class in school history the same year—and still landed on a non-profit watchdog’s financial-health watch list, receiving the lowest score a school can post while still being considered financially responsible. The lesson embedded in that pairing is blunt: record enrollment no longer guarantees financial safety, and families evaluating any tuition-dependent private college now have reason to look past the admissions brochure and into the school’s actual balance sheet.

That’s precisely the environment where Missouri’s low-cost public infrastructure stops being a consolation prize and starts being a competitive advantage. The state’s public university and community college system was built on affordability long before affordability became the deciding factor in where students enroll, and that positioning matters more in a buyer’s market than it ever did in a seller’s one. Institutions that can compete on price without deep tuition discounting—the kind private colleges are increasingly forced into to hold enrollment—are the ones built to hold steady while the smaller, tuition-dependent schools around them consolidate or close.

The state has also built real financial infrastructure to keep adults and career-changers flowing into that system. The Fast Track Workforce Incentive Grant, launched in 2018 to cover tuition and fees for adult learners entering high-demand fields, has helped more than 3,000 Missourians and distributed over $17 million in aid through more than 100 participating institutions—and the program got a $2 million funding increase in the state’s fiscal 2026 budget, along with a policy change that no longer converts the grant into a repayable loan for graduates who don’t stay in-state three years. That’s a meaningful de-risking of the offer at exactly the moment more adults are weighing whether a credential is worth pursuing at all.

The state has set itself a specific target to hit through all of this: 60 percent of working-age Missourians holding a quality credential or degree by 2030, the goal driving Fast Track’s occupation targeting and the broader alignment between community college programs and MERIC’s labor-demand projections. Whether Missouri reaches that number will say as much about the state’s workforce pipeline as it does about higher education—the two are, at this point, functionally the same conversation.

That advantage runs deepest at the flagship level, where Missouri isn’t just cheap—it’s genuinely competitive. The University of Missouri’s Columbia campus carries a full medical and research complex; Missouri State’s Springfield campus has grown into one of the region’s largest public universities; Truman State continues to carry a reputation for undergraduate rigor well beyond its enrollment size. None of that changes because the applicant pool is shrinking—if anything, larger institutions with real financial cushion and a track record of investment are exactly what a demographically nervous market rewards, and it’s a list Missouri’s public system fields at every tier from research university to community college.

None of this erases the real pain the enrollment cliff is inflicting on individual campuses and the communities built around them; a college closure is a genuine loss, not just a market correction. But for the families and career-changers doing the shopping in 2026, the math has flipped in their favor for the first time in decades—and Missouri’s bet on affordable, public higher education looks less like caution and more like foresight.

PUBLISHED AUGUST 2026