It has become trendy to predict that higher education is on the verge of a major collapse, with enrolments falling as loan debt and rising tuition fees cause students and families to ask harder questions about the value of a university degree.

In the US, the?most extreme predictions?envision hundreds and even thousands of universities?closing over a decade or so. But more even-keeled analysts also have foreseen increases in the number of failing institutions:?in 2015, for instance, Moody¡¯s Investors Service?, respectively, in the coming years.

New federal data suggest the increasing financial pressures may be starting to take a toll on institutions.??from the Education Department¡¯s National Center for Education Statistics shows that the number of colleges and universities eligible to award federal financial aid to their students fell by 5.6?per cent from 2015-16 to 2016-17. That¡¯s the fourth straight decline since a peak of 7,416 institutions in 2012-13. It is also by far the largest (the others were 0.3,?1.2 and 2 per cent, in order).

There¡¯s a giant asterisk on the data for those predicting the decline and fall of traditional higher education: as in the past, the vast majority of the vanishing institutions are for-profit colleges. Some of that sector¡¯s problems are shared with non-profit institutions (declines in the number of traditional college-age students, concerns about debt and price), but for-profit institutions also have encountered aggressive regulation from the federal government and self-inflicted wounds from misbehavior and poor performance.

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That combination of factors contributed to a one-year drop of 11.2?per cent (from 3,265 to 2,899) in the number of for-profit institutions, according to the federal data, and a sharp decline of 17.8 per cent since the 2012-13 academic year.

While for-profit colleges¡¯ woes may be driving the numbers, public and private nonprofit colleges have not been immune.

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The number of public colleges edged down to 1,985 in 2016-17, from 1,990 in 2015-16 and 2,009 in 2012-13.

These are likely to include the several institutions in Georgia that were part of mergers.

The number of private non-profit institutions, meanwhile, fell by 33, or 1.7?per cent, from 2015-16 to 2016-17, from 1,909 to 1,876. But the 2015-16 number had risen by almost that amount the year before, so it¡¯s not entirely clear how significant that drop is, or how representative it is of what is to come.

This is an edited version of a story which .

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