Should colleges share students instead of competing for them?

Enrollment management is built on a single unspoken assumption: that every student is a prize to be won from someone else. The whole apparatus, the recruitment travel, the merit aid, the yield models, the competitive scholarship matching, exists to capture a larger share of students than the institution down the road. For decades that made sense, because the pool was growing and the game was positive-sum. Win more students, grow the institution, everybody could win at once.

That assumption no longer holds, and clinging to it is getting institutions killed. When the pool itself is shrinking, competing harder is not a strategy. It is a more expensive way to lose.

The cost of winning the old game

The numbers on the losing end of this competition are no longer abstract. According to BestColleges, roughly 89 public and private nonprofit institutions have closed, merged, or announced plans to do so since March 2020. Sixteen nonprofit colleges announced closures in 2025 alone, matching the prior year.

And the forecast is worse than the history: Huron Consulting estimates that 442 private nonprofit colleges, about a quarter of the sector, sit at moderate-to-high risk of closing or merging within the decade. Those at-risk institutions enroll close to 670,000 students.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which built a predictive model of closures, found the pattern is consistent: the institutions that close are smaller, more tuition-dependent, and have been losing enrollment and revenue for years before the doors shut. These are not failures of mission. They are institutions that ran the competitive playbook against the math and the math won.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Almost every one of those closures was a zero-sum loss for the whole system. When a regional college folds, its students scatter, many lose credit, and a meaningful share never re-enroll anywhere. The "winning" institutions in that region do not actually absorb all of that enrollment. A good deal of it simply evaporates. Competition did not redistribute those students. It destroyed the seats.

Collaboration is not new, and it is not a theory

The alternative is not radical, and it is not untested. It has been running quietly for decades at some of the most established institutions in the country.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance has operated its CourseShare program for more than 20 years, letting degree-seeking students at member universities enroll in courses offered at other member campuses, with credit and grades applying directly to the student's home degree and no extra tuition charged. More than 1,500 courses have been shared this way, serving over 5,500 students, in subjects that no single campus could justify staffing alone. The consortium did not lose its competitive edge by sharing. It expanded what each member could offer.

The model is now reaching well beyond elite research universities. Course-sharing networks like Acadeum connect more than 475 colleges and universities, many of them small and tuition-dependent, exactly the institutions the closure data should worry most. The mechanics are straightforward: a college with an open seat in a scheduled course makes it available to a partner institution's student who needs that class, and the two schools share the tuition. The seat was already being taught. Filling it with a partner's student turns spare capacity into revenue.

The results are not subtle. An Inside Higher Ed report in 2025 profiled the University of Mount Union, a small Ohio liberal arts college that had been losing roughly $900,000 in tuition in a single summer as its students went elsewhere for required courses it could not offer flexibly. After joining a course-sharing network, Mount Union tripled its summer enrollment and quadrupled its summer revenue, reaching about $1.1 million in 2024. At Angelo State University, 70 percent of the students who used course sharing between 2021 and 2024 had not been on track to graduate when they started. Sharing courses did not cannibalize enrollment. It kept students enrolled who were otherwise about to leave.

Why institutions resist, and why the reasons are wearing thin

If the case is this clear, why is collaboration still the exception? The honest answer is not logistical. It is cultural and competitive.

Institutions resist because sharing students feels like surrender. There is a real fear that a student who takes one course elsewhere will leave entirely, that opening your catalog invites a competitor into your relationship with your own students. There are legitimate governance questions too: faculty oversight of academic quality, how tuition and financial aid flow across institutions, who owns the student record. These are not trivial, and pretending they are would be its own kind of dishonesty.

But notice what the consortium models actually show. In course sharing, the home institution keeps the student, keeps a share of the tuition, and keeps them progressing toward a degree it grants.

The competitor scenario, the one institutions fear, is the status quo: the student who cannot get a course at home and leaves to take it, or to stop out, with no revenue retained and no relationship preserved. Course sharing is the answer to that fear, not the cause of it. The governance concerns are real, but they are solvable, and consortia have been solving them for 20 years.

The question for the board

This is not an argument that competition is bad or that institutions should stop recruiting. It is an argument against zero-sum thinking in a non-zero-sum reality. An institution can compete for first-time students and collaborate to retain and serve them at the same time. The two are not in conflict. They are different tools for different moments in the student's path.

The leadership board-level question is simple, and the demographic math makes it urgent. When the next required course comes up short at your institution, and it will, do you want that student to disappear into the competitive void behind those closures and mergers, or do you want a partnership already in place that keeps them enrolled, keeps the tuition, and keeps them moving toward a degree with your name on it?

The institutions that answer that question early, from a position of strength, will be the ones writing the next chapter of higher education. The ones that wait until crisis forces the conversation will be negotiating from the edge, if they get to negotiate at all.