When J. Michael Haynie, chancellor of Syracuse University, announced last month that the university would miss its enrollment target and run a deficit for the first time in years, he was unusually candid for a college president. 

“Enrollment volatility is widespread, unpredictable and the ‘new normal’ for even strong, well-resourced universities,” he wrote.

To be sure, the enrollment math for colleges was always going to be negative this year. The high school graduating class of 2026 is the first in a long line of smaller ones that will last through the end of the next decade. This is known as the “enrollment cliff,” and it is the result of a birthrate that fell during the Great Recession and never recovered. 

While college leaders saw the demographic decline coming for more than a decade, what they didn’t expect was the financial uncertainty imposed on higher education by the second Trump administration. Since last year, the White House has eliminated thousands of research grants to colleges and universities, proposed deep cuts in remaining research funding, and tightened access to student visas, leading enrollment of new foreign students at American universities to drop by more than a third—the largest annual decrease outside of the COVID pandemic. President Donald Trump’s policies have blown a hole in university budgets, forcing schools to cut spending and quickly look for new revenue everywhere. 

Now, colleges and universities are bracing for the most consequential rewrite of federal higher-education policy in a generation. On July 1, provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act took effect, which, among other things, will put new........

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