How South American Universities Are Confronting Declining Birth Rates
SANTIAGO, Chile — The declining birth rate across many parts of the world has become an issue that is leading educational institutions around the world to analyze its impact on enrollment. In the United States, some have closed their doors because they don’t have enough students.
Between 2010 and 2022, colleges and universities experienced a 15% decline in enrollment, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The case of Iowa Wesleyan University, a 181-year-old institution that shut down in 2023, was highlighted in a story produced by The Hechinger Report and published on NPR in 2025.
The university’s old gym was demolished, a path that other universities are likely to follow in coming years.
READ: The King’s College Permanently Shuts Down Following Financial Woes
In Latin America, the “demographic cliff” — a term credited to have been coined by economist and professor Nathan Grawe, who in 2018 published the book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education — is becoming as severe as in the United States.
In Colombia, school enrollment declined 9% between 2015 and 2025, due to the decrease in birth rates and the rise of homeschooling, which is more difficult to quantify, according to a report by the Education Economics Laboratory at Javeriana University.
As a result, about 380 primary and high schools closed between 2019 and 2023. The decline in school enrollment will eventually affect universities.
“We may see significant drops in higher education enrollment at various universities as the years go by. We could say that the decline will be more noticeable in 2034, or from 2030 onwards,” said Silvio López, professor and researcher at Javeriana University, a Jesuit institution. While some schools have closed or merged already, the same could happen to universities.
Larger universities have focused on continuing education, consulting projects and online programs in addition to undergraduate studies to maintain their funding. In Colombia, the fertility rate fell to 1.6 children per woman in 2024, from 6.7 in 1960, according to the World Bank.
“We may see a trend to close programs and then higher education institutions, mainly smaller ones whose budgets depend mostly on undergraduate tuition fees,” López added.
Teens are also prioritizing working over studying, contributing to the decline in university enrollment.
“Half of the population between the ages of 17 and 21 is not enrolled in higher education. This may be due not only to falling birth rates but also to the fact that people graduating from high school immediately enter the workforce. There's a shift in their preferences because they need to work to earn an income, and this means they have to stop studying,” López said.
Another group of the population is opting for shorter technical training programs, lasting between six months and two years, instead of a traditional four-year university education.
“These programs are more affordable. Some see them as more practical for entering the job market more quickly,” he added.
Universities are embracing the concept of lifelong learning, more relevant than ever before.
“Continuing education has grown significantly, even more than undergraduate studies, because it offers shorter training periods,” said Claudia Mejías, academic vice-rector of the Catholic University of Valparaíso in Chile.
This university has also been working to reach people who remain active over the age of 60 with a senior action plan in place, she said.
The Catholic University of Valparaíso, the largest in the Valparaíso region, continues to attract students, some of whom are in the government’s free tuition program. The institution has maintained its growth in enrollment.
“This is due to the university’s prestige, which has allowed it to position itself in the Valparaíso region. Four years ago, first-year undergraduate enrollment was around 3,000 students. Today, we have over 4,600 first-year students,” she said, adding that this outcome is unlikely to be the same for all institutions in Chile.
The lower birth rate, which in Chile fell from 5.4 children per woman in 1960 to 1.06 in 2024 according to the National Institute of Statistics, first impacts kindergartens and schools, and then takes between 10 and 15 years to reach universities.
Some 93% of the Catholic University of Valparaíso’s 20,000 students are undergraduates attending in-person classes. This institution has sought to strengthen support for students who have become parents. It has also emphasized the role of family among undergraduates.
Venezuelan immigrants, who have arrived in most Latin American countries, have prevented Chile’s birth rate from falling further. However, they haven’t offset the decline in the number of school-age Chileans.
“At one point, it was suggested that the migration we were experiencing would compensate for the low birth rate among native citizens, but this hasn’t been the case,” said Mejías. With 66 students, Venezuelans constitute the largest group of foreigners attending their first year at the Catholic University of Valparaíso.
Venezuelan school enrollment has been more significant in Colombia due to the proximity between the two countries. “The situation would be more critical for certain schools if they did not have that enrollment,” said López.
In Chile, some universities are focusing primarily on online programs, a format that the pandemic accelerated globally. Gabriela Mistral University, Chile’s first private university, embraced online programs to increase enrollment.
“We have an additional offering aimed at working people. Some 70% of our enrollment is concentrated in this segment, which studies online,” said rector Sergio Mena in a 2025 interview with the newspaper La Tercera. “We decided to take a path that only universities in Europe or the United States had explored.”
Universities in Colombia and Chile may follow what has happened in the United States, where some of its education institutions closed due to a lack of students.
In Adrian, Michigan, the 107-year-old private Catholic institution Siena Heights University is also shutting down this year. Sterling College in Vermont is following the same path and has put its Craftsbury campus up for sale.
In all these cases, a decline in student enrollment was a determining factor in the decision to close permanently. Smaller colleges and universities are finding it more difficult to stay open, which may be the case for similarly sized Chilean and Colombian institutions in the next decade.
“Our projection for the country is that not all universities will survive,” Mejías said.
Graciela Ibáñez is a journalist with a Master of Arts from Columbia Journalism School, where she graduated in 2008. She works as a professor of journalism at Universidad Gabriela Mistral and at Universidad Viña del Mar in Chile. She covers Chile for foreign media outlets, including TRT World, Americas Quarterly and The Art Newspaper. She worked as a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires and REDD Intelligence in Santiago and for Debtwire in New York City. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Viña del Mar.