The Silent Crisis: College Closures and the EdTech Failure Behind Them

Sterling College sits on 130 acres in rural Vermont, its isolation both its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability. There are no cell towers and barely any passing traffic. For students, that remoteness can feel intentional, a refuge from the scale and pressure of traditional universities.

But in today's digital-first college enrollment ecosystem, isolation doesn't just mean distance. It means invisibility.

Sterling recently announced it would close at the end of the semester, becoming one of several institutions to shut down in Vermont in recent years. According to projections from Huron Consulting Group, as cited by the Hechinger Report, 442 private colleges are at risk of closing or merging within the next decade.

This is often framed as a demographic or financial problem. Declining birth rates, fewer international students, and shifting attitudes toward higher education are all part of the story.

But there is a deeper issue at the center of this crisis:

A systemic mismatch between how higher education technology is built and how institutions compete for students.

Why the College Enrollment Crisis Is Also a Discovery Problem

The modern student journey begins online. Search engines, social platforms, and digital content shape how students discover colleges long before they ever submit an application.

In this environment, visibility is everything.

A prospective student searching for a "small college with a farm program" is unlikely to find a place like Sterling College. Instead, they are directed toward institutions with stronger SEO strategies, digital marketing infrastructure, and larger advertising budgets.

This is not accidental. Digital discovery is increasingly a winner-take-all system.

Larger universities invest heavily in content strategy, paid acquisition, and conversion optimization. Smaller institutions, often operating with limited staff and constrained budgets, simply cannot compete at the same level.

The result is not just declining enrollment, it's structural invisibility.

Even as demand for differentiated educational experiences exists, the institutions offering those experiences are becoming harder to find.

How EdTech Contributed to the Problem

The education technology sector recognized that enrollment was becoming more competitive. Its response was to build more powerful, data-driven tools.

These include Student Information Systems (SIS), enrollment management platforms, predictive analytics dashboards, and AI-driven marketing tools.

For large universities, these systems can be transformative.

For small colleges, they are often irrelevant.

A rural institution with fewer than 500 students does not need a complex, multi-layered analytics platform. It needs a simple way to tell its story, reach the right students, and convert interest into enrollment.

Instead, the market delivered tools that assume scale, technical capacity, and dedicated teams. This is where the edtech failure becomes clear. The institutions that most need digital leverage are the least able to use the tools designed to provide it.

The Enrollment Paradox Small Colleges Can't Escape

At the same time that digital competition has intensified, the overall pool of college-bound students has shrunk. The percentage of high school graduates enrolling in college has declined significantly in recent years.

This creates a compounding effect.

Small colleges are not just competing in a tougher market, they are doing so with fewer resources, less visibility, and tools that do not align with their strengths.

Their value propositions are often deeply human. Close-knit communities, hands-on learning, meaningful faculty relationships, and alternative academic models define their appeal.

But these qualities do not translate easily into search rankings or paid campaigns. You cannot reduce belonging, mentorship, or community into a high-performing keyword strategy.

And yet, that is exactly what the current system demands.

The problem isn't unique to institutions facing closure. Even Syracuse University, a large private institution with a $2.3 billion endowment, recently eliminated 93 academic programs due to misalignment with student demand (Higher Ed Dive). What makes Syracuse's situation revealing is that it was not driven by financial distress, the university has posted nine-figure budget surpluses since fiscal 2018. Instead, the cuts came from a desire to right-size the institution's offerings, which numbered roughly 460 degrees and certificates before the reductions, well above the peer average of roughly 200 programs. Even well-resourced institutions struggle to align their academic portfolio with what students actually want.

If the goal had been to support the full ecosystem of higher education—not just its largest institutions, the technology landscape would look very different. Small colleges need tools that prioritize clarity over complexity. They need digital platforms that function as intuitive front doors, not enterprise systems requiring months of implementation.

A more effective approach would center on mobile-first enrollment experiences, built-in discoverability, and storytelling-driven design. Instead of forcing institutions into rigid workflows, these tools would help them communicate what makes them distinct.

They would also integrate naturally with the platforms students already use, from social media to search, rather than relying on closed, proprietary systems.

Most importantly, they would lower the barrier to participation in digital discovery.

That is the missing piece.

Why This Matters Beyond Small Colleges

The closure of hundreds of colleges is not just an institutional issue. It reshapes the entire higher education landscape.

When small colleges disappear, students lose access to alternative learning environments. Communities lose economic anchors. Educational diversity shrinks.

There is also a human cost that is often overlooked. Research shows that fewer than half of students affected by college closures continue their education (Inside Higher Ed). These are not abstract outcomes. They are the direct result of a system that increasingly concentrates opportunity in fewer, larger institutions.

Technology has played a role in accelerating that concentration.

Sterling College gave its students something rare: time to finish, reflect, and say goodbye. Most institutions do not have that luxury.

That final gesture reflects a set of values rooted in community and care.

It also raises an uncomfortable question for the edtech sector.

What values are embedded in the tools being built today?

If the answer is scale, efficiency, and revenue optimization, then the current trajectory makes sense. Larger institutions will continue to dominate, and smaller ones will continue to disappear.

But if the goal is access, diversity, and student outcomes, then something has gone wrong.

The fact that 442 colleges are at risk of closing is not simply a correction in the market. It is evidence of a system that is failing to support its most vulnerable participants.

And it is a failure that technology was supposed to prevent.