Education’s Pipeline Problem

Every fall, the headcounts land on the desks of university presidents in Columbia, Lawrence, Manhattan and Kansas City, and they are read the way a CFO reads a quarterly report: top line first, then the detail that tells you whether the top line means anything.

For employers in this region, the detail matters more. Behind enrollment sit the figures that will decide who is available to work the nursing units, plant floors and job sites a few years from now: what states spend per student, what students pay, how ready high school graduates are when they arrive, and where job growth is actually happening.

Start in Kansas. The public system coordinated by the Board of Regents counted 177,768 students this fall, 1,356 fewer than a year ago. In percentage terms, that’s less than a point. But it’s the first system-wide decline after three straight years of growth, and further evidence that a downward trend anticipated for years is taking hold.

The six state universities weren’t the problem. Taken together, they were up 0.7 percent. Emporia State jumped 6 percent, to 5,110. Fort Hays State gained 4 percent, to 13,359. KU edged up by half a point to 27,352, and including KU Medical Center, its total of 31,464 is a record. K-State held essentially flat at 20,789 on its main campuses.

Two schools went the other way. Wichita State fell 2.5 percent to 18,003, largely because of a sharp drop in international graduate students. Pittsburg State slipped 0.6 percent, to 5,766, extending a longer slide: Enrollment there is down 18.8 percent from a decade ago.

The bigger slide came in the two-year sector. Community colleges fell 1.9 percent, to 63,605. Technical colleges dropped 6.8 percent, to 11,412, though there’s a long-view caveat: tech-college enrollment is still 20 percent above where it was five years ago and 47 percent above a decade ago.

Pull back to the whole system, and you get a split verdict. Enrollment is 6.5 percent above the post-COVID low of five years ago, and 2.7 percent below where it stood 10 years ago.

“After three years of growth, our system is experiencing flat enrollment this fall, with uneven results across sectors and institutions,” said Alysia Johnston, who chairs the Regents. “The Board remains focused on ensuring that education beyond high school remains affordable and accessible for Kansans and that students who enroll in our system achieve success in college and after graduation.”

Johnston has made a similar case in pitching the system’s budget: operating costs are rising, and the Regents want targeted investments to both preserve access and help grow the state’s economy.

In Lawrence, Chancellor Doug Girod had a third straight record to talk about. “Three consecutive years of record enrollment reflect the strength of our work to recruit students and, just as importantly, to help existing students succeed once they arrive at KU,” he said. “We’re proud that students continue to see the value of a KU education and that more of them are staying on track to earn their degrees.”

But he also sees what’s coming. “Demographic trends are expected to put increasing pressure on enrollment nationally in the years ahead,” Girod said. “That makes it especially important for KU to remain proactive and intentional in how we recruit and support students.”

At Wichita State, the same semester produced two different headlines. Overall headcount fell, yet the freshman class was the biggest in school history.

“This year’s enrollment reflects both the opportunities and challenges facing higher education,” said President Rick Muma. “We’re proud to welcome the largest first-time-in-college freshman class in our history while continuing to see growth among students from Sedgwick County, our partner states and our dual-credit programs.”

The drag was international graduate enrollment, a decline several institutions have tied to changes in federal visa processing.

Missouri’s numbers run on a different calendar. The most recent statewide figures available, from fall 2025, show full-time-equivalent enrollment (part-time students converted to full-time equivalents) down 0.5 percent from the year before and 2.2 percent below fall 2020, according to the Coordinating Board for Higher Education. Public universities slipped 0.6 percent. Community and technical colleges did better, and first-time, degree-seeking freshmen were up at both four-year and two-year public schools.

Bennett Boggs, commissioner of the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development, measures all of that against two targets for 2030: 60 percent of adults holding a postsecondary credential and 70 percent labor force participation. “We are committed to doing our part to make sure Missourians have the skills, training, and education necessary to compete for good, quality jobs,” Boggs said. “Together, we will continue to improve the talent pipeline that will attract new employers to the Show-Me state.”

Then there’s the arithmetic neither state can recruit its way around. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that Kansas and Missouri will each graduate 12 percent fewer high school seniors in 2041 than in 2023. That’s a smaller pool for colleges to draw from, and a few years later, for employers.

That’s the head-count problem, but it’s only part of the challenge matrix. The readiness problem shows up in test scores, and it has been running in the same direction for a decade.

In Kansas, the statewide composite ACT score fell from 21.9 for the Class of 2015 to 19.0 for the Class of 2025, dropping in nine of those 10 years and holding flat in the other. Part of the early slide traces to a policy change: beginning in 2019, the state offered the exam free to juniors, which brought in students who once would have skipped it.

Still, the decline kept going after that wave washed through, from 19.8 in 2022 to 19.0 this year. Of the 284 Kansas districts and school systems with scores in both 2015 and last year, 277 came in lower.

Missouri’s record is harder to read because for three years in the middle of the past decade nearly every graduate sat for the test, which pulled the average down. Line up years when about the same share of students tested, though, and the direction matches that in Kansas. In 2015, about two-thirds of Missouri graduates took the ACT, and the average across districts, weighted by the number tested, was 21.4, according to an Ingram’s analysis of state education department data. In 2025, with 62 percent tested, it was 19.9. A smaller share of test-takers would normally nudge scores up, not down.

For now, Missouri high schools are turning out more graduates, not fewer: 65,339 in 2025, up from 60,406 four years earlier—more diplomas, lower scores.

The metro’s high-scoring suburbs haven’t been spared. In Kansas, Blue Valley’s district composite was 25.4 in 2015; this year it was 22.5. Olathe fell from 24.0 to 21.0, Shawnee Mission from 23.9 to 21.0 and De Soto from 24.0 to 20.6. On the Missouri side, Park Hill dropped from 23.9 to 20.9, Blue Springs from 22.8 to 19.9 and North Kansas City from 21.2 to 18.5. A few districts have held their ground: Lee’s Summit, Kearney and Platte County R-III are all within about half a point of where they were in 2015.

Year to year, the picture can look better than it is. Seventeen of the 25 top-ranked Missouri-side districts on this year’s Ingram’s list improved on their 2024 scores. Stretch the view to a decade, and the Missouri-side metro average, weighted by test-takers, slid from 21.3 to 19.4, with the share of graduates tested holding near two-thirds. On the Kansas side, all 36 districts in Ingram’s coverage area that had scores in both years were lower in 2025 than in 2015.

None of this is unique to the region. Nationally, the average composite score for the Class of 2025 was 19.4, unchanged from a year earlier and well below where it stood a decade ago. That figure reflects only the roughly one graduate in three who took the test nationwide, which makes straight comparisons with state numbers shaky.

For four-year colleges, public and private, it’s a second squeeze on top of the demographic one. A pool of graduates that will soon start shrinking is arriving less prepared, and every school is chasing the same well-prepared slice of it. Schools that reach deeper into the pool take on more students who need extra help to finish, which means more spending on advising, tutoring and introductory coursework, at a time when state support and tuition increases are both limited. Schools that hold the line on admissions risk empty seats. Regional universities without a flagship’s recruiting reach have the least room to maneuver.

Money sets the outer limits. In fiscal 2025, inflation-adjusted state education appropriations totaled roughly $13,121 per full-time-equivalent student in Kansas and $10,972 in Missouri, a gap of more than $2,100 per student. Most public university boards have approved tuition increases of 3 to 6 percent per year.

The degree, however, still pays. KU’s economic-impact work puts the student benefit-to-cost ratio at about 5.7 to 1, or roughly $5.70 back for every dollar spent. In the Kansas City metro, about 40 percent of adults now hold at least a bachelor’s degree, which means some heavy lifting ahead to reach the 60 percent threshold envisioned by policy makers. Missouri’s own targets, though, assume more future jobs will need education or training beyond high school than today’s attainment rate can supply.

Which brings the discussion back to the job market. Total nonfarm employment in the Kansas City metro was up 0.7 percent from a year earlier in August, to about 1.178 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Education and health services, manufacturing and construction have led; information and financial activities have trailed.

The shortages employers and workforce officials keep naming haven’t changed much: registered nurses, industrial maintenance technicians, machine operators, commercial truck drivers and skilled construction trades.

“Workforce is one of the most important competitiveness issues facing our region,” said Floyd May, president of the Civic Council of Greater Kansas City. Kara Lowe, president of the KC Tech Council, frames the local challenge less as a pure supply problem than a connection problem: existing talent and open roles too often fail to meet.

For employers, a flatter pipeline of traditional-age students, programs that don’t always align with demand, and continued cost pressures add up to longer searches for jobs that require a credential and greater reliance on in-house training or partnerships with community and technical colleges. 

Schools that can demonstrate a clear wage payoff and a short path to a high-demand job retain their pricing power. Schools that can’t will keep feeling the squeeze on enrollment and funding.

The Class of 2041, projected to be 12 percent smaller than the Class of 2023 if the actuarial tables hold, hasn’t started kindergarten yet. The hospitals, plants, design firms and logistics operations that will be competing for its graduates are already open for business.

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2026