You and your board have probably all had stories about the WICHE projections sent to you numerous times. If you read just the headlines, you’re probably despairing. Are they that bad? Yes, but perhaps no.

The headlines tell you the number of high school graduates is likely to plummet by over 11% between 2025 (the peak year) and 2040. This is, perhaps, a good example of the anchoring fallacy. What if you took a longer look?

You could say that the number is going to increase by over 2% from 2009.

Of course, we’ve all gotten used to the numbers of recent years, and we all know cutting is harder than growing, even though everyone assumes (probably correctly) that cuts in budgets and operations are inevitable.

But even this information is not complete: Whether this is a doomsday scenario for your institution or an opportunity hiding in the weeds depends on a lot of things, like where you’re located, where you draw your students from, how your tuition is set, and how you use (or don’t) this information in your planning.

Want to learn more or dig down on this data? You can get 30 minutes of my time for free. Click here to look at the EnrollmentVP website and browse to the contact page, or just email me.