Why Higher Education Keeps Waiting Until Age 17 to Meet Its Future Students
Most university leadership teams are treating the demographic cliff as a marketing problem when part of it is a pipeline-design problem. They buy more names, send more emails, hire enrollment consultants, increase digital advertising, and fight harder for the attention of the same shrinking population of high school juniors and seniors. Then they wonder why recruitment costs keep rising while enrollment becomes more difficult to predict. The more interesting question is why universities wait until students are 17 years old to begin building the relationship.
The demographic problem is not theoretical anymore. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that the number of U.S. high school graduates peaked in 2025 and will decline approximately 13% by 2041 (Lane et al., 2024). That means universities are entering an era in which thousands of institutions will compete for a gradually shrinking traditional student population. Marketing harder does not manufacture more 18-year-olds. (WICHE)
There are 3,722 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, 2024). There is unfortunately no federal dataset that counts how many of those institutions operate an intentional K–12-to-university feeder system, so claims that a precise percentage of universities do this should be treated cautiously. The International Association of Laboratory Schools reports only slightly more than 100 laboratory schools associated with colleges and universities worldwide, not merely in the United States (International Association of Laboratory Schools [IALS], n.d.). Even if we made the intentionally unrealistic assumption that every one of those schools were American, the number would still equal only about 3% of U.S. degree-granting institutions, and true university feeder systems represent an even narrower category. (National Center for Education Statistics)
That distinction between a university-affiliated school and an actual university pathway matters. Stanford Online High School, for example, is operated within the Stanford ecosystem but explicitly states that it is not a feeder school to Stanford University and does not increase a student’s likelihood of admission (Stanford Online High School, n.d.). That is an academically important model, but it is not the strategy I am describing here. I am talking about institutions intentionally connecting secondary education, college coursework, university experiences, advising, and eventual postsecondary opportunities into one pathway. (Stanford Online High School)
Arizona State University is one of the clearest examples of what that pathway can look like. ASU Preparatory Academy operates public charter and digital K–12 options while explicitly describing a pathway that begins as early as kindergarten and later connects students with actual ASU university courses (ASU Preparatory Academy, n.d.). High school students can take tuition-free college courses, earn ASU academic credit, explore prospective majors, and build a personalized pathway connecting high school, university study, and careers. ASU Prep even describes its objective as encouraging students to see their educational journey as connected to being a Sun Devil from the beginning. (ASU Preparatory Academy)
Think about the strategic difference between that approach and traditional university recruiting. One model purchases access to a prospective student late in high school and hopes that an advertisement, email, campus tour, or financial aid package produces an application. The other can create years of academic experiences, college credits, advising relationships, familiarity with the institution, and successful interactions with university-level coursework before the traditional admissions process even begins. One is a marketing funnel, while the other starts looking a lot more like an educational pipeline.
Purdue University provides an equally interesting example because the pathway was explicitly designed to lead students toward Purdue. Purdue Polytechnic High Schools were established to build new K–12 pathways leading to Purdue University, particularly for students underserved by traditional schools and underrepresented in higher education (Purdue University, 2022). Among the 113 students in the network’s 2022 graduating class, 34, or 30%, accepted offers of admission to Purdue’s West Lafayette campus, while another 40 were accepted by other higher education institutions. Purdue did not simply market itself to those students during senior year because the university helped build the educational environment in which many of them prepared for what came next. (Purdue University)
ASU and Purdue are not the only universities operating below the traditional college boundary. Indiana University has operated distance high school education for nearly a century, and today IU High School is embedded within the university and provides a complete online secondary education option (Indiana University High School, n.d.). Mizzou Academy operates elementary, middle, and high school programs through the University of Missouri, serves students across all 50 states and more than 60 countries, and can award a University of Missouri High School diploma (Mizzou Academy, n.d.). These institutions differ considerably in mission and structure, but collectively they demonstrate that the wall separating universities from K–12 education is a choice rather than a technological requirement. (IU High School Online)
The research surrounding early college provides a good reason to pay attention to this idea. A federally supported study of Early College High Schools found that 84.2% of participating students had enrolled in college by the tenth study year compared with 77.0% of students in the control group (Institute of Education Sciences [IES], n.d.). Postsecondary credential completion showed an even larger difference, with 45.4% of early-college students earning a certificate, associate degree, or bachelor’s degree compared with 33.5% of the control group. That research does not prove that every university should operate a high school, but it does provide strong evidence that intentionally connecting secondary and postsecondary education can change student outcomes. (Institute of Education Sciences)
Dual enrollment provides another piece of the puzzle, but simply allowing high school students to take random college courses misses much of the opportunity. Fink and Jenkins (2023) argue that dual enrollment should function as an intentional on-ramp to college degree programs rather than a collection of disconnected courses, and they note that more than 1.5 million high school students already participate in college-credit coursework annually. Their Dual Enrollment Equity Pathways framework connects outreach, degree and career alignment, early advising, academic planning, college instruction, and student support. In other words, the strongest version of dual enrollment looks less like early course shopping and more like pathway architecture. (Community College Research Center)
Then there is a finding that university enrollment leaders should study closely. Tipton (2024) examined students participating in Ohio’s College Credit Plus program and found that 34% of students who completed their courses on the university campus later matriculated at that same university, compared with only 5.8% of those taking their college courses at their high school. This was an observational study, so we should not pretend the campus experience alone caused the difference, and students choosing to come to campus may already differ from those who do not. Still, a difference that large should make enrollment leaders curious about what happens when a student stops imagining a university and actually starts experiencing one. (Wiley Online Library)
That is where the idea of a recruitment moat becomes interesting. A student who has completed university coursework, interacted successfully with faculty and staff, learned the technology systems, visited the campus, accumulated credits, and begun seeing a degree as attainable has a fundamentally different relationship with an institution than somebody whose name was purchased from a prospect list. The university is no longer introducing itself because it is already part of the student’s educational history. That does not guarantee matriculation, but it changes the recruitment conversation considerably.
Higher education spends an extraordinary amount of institutional capital repeatedly acquiring attention that it could have spent years building. Every recruitment cycle starts another expensive contest for clicks, inquiries, applications, deposits, and enrollment, and much of that investment disappears when a student selects another institution. A vertically integrated pathway does not eliminate recruitment costs or competition, but it creates something digital advertising cannot easily purchase: accumulated institutional familiarity. Businesses call that a competitive moat, and universities should not pretend the economics disappear simply because their product happens to be education.
The potential benefits extend beyond recruitment. A well-designed pathway can align secondary coursework with university expectations, allow students to accumulate transferable credits, expose them to majors before selecting one, reduce uncertainty about college-level work, and potentially shorten the time and cost required to complete a degree. ASU Prep, for example, allows students to begin taking tuition-free university courses in high school and describes pathways capable of producing substantial college credit before graduation. When the transition from twelfth grade to freshman year becomes less of an academic cliff itself, retention and completion become part of the conversation too. (ASU Preparatory Academy)
There is also an equity argument here, although universities need to be careful not to turn it into marketing copy. Fink and Jenkins (2023) note that students from several populations historically underrepresented in higher education remain underrepresented in dual enrollment despite evidence that these programs can improve postsecondary outcomes. Purdue specifically created its high school initiative in part to build pathways for students underserved by traditional systems and underrepresented in higher education. A university-created pathway becomes far more interesting when it reaches students who were not already guaranteed to walk through somebody’s college doors. (Community College Research Center)
None of this means that every university needs to purchase land and start operating elementary schools next semester. Vertical integration can take different forms, including laboratory schools, charter partnerships, university-operated online academies, hybrid programs, dual-credit pathways, early-college programs, and partnerships that allow existing K–12 schools to use university curriculum. Digital delivery makes the geographic limitations of the old laboratory-school model substantially less relevant than they once were. A regional university could conceivably begin building relationships with students hundreds of miles from campus years before asking any of them to submit an undergraduate application.
The strategic question is therefore larger than whether a university should own a high school. The question is how much of the educational journey an institution is willing to help design before asking the learner to become a paying undergraduate student. Higher education has traditionally allowed K–12 systems to own almost the entire upstream relationship and then entered the market near the end, when every competitor arrives at roughly the same time. In almost any other industry, we would recognize that as an awfully strange way to manage a supply chain.
There are legitimate complications, including regulation, accreditation, governance, funding, admissions ethics, transferability, academic freedom, and the fundamental principle that students must remain free to attend whatever university they choose. Stanford’s deliberate separation between its online high school and Stanford undergraduate admissions provides a useful reminder that university-sponsored secondary education does not have to become captive recruitment. The objective should not be to trap a thirteen-year-old inside a university brand. The objective should be to build educational pathways good enough that remaining with the institution later becomes a rational option rather than the product of a senior-year advertising campaign. (Stanford Online High School)
This is why I think the demographic cliff is being discussed too narrowly. Universities cannot solve a structural decline in the number of high school graduates by redesigning a landing page, increasing the admissions advertising budget, or buying another CRM. They need to examine when their relationship with future learners begins, what value they provide before matriculation, and whether their K–12 strategy consists of anything more meaningful than recruiters showing up at college fairs. If your university’s enrollment strategy begins when a student becomes a high school junior, you may already be years late.
The institutions experimenting with these models are not waiting for the demographic environment to improve because the demographic environment probably will not improve anytime soon. They are moving upstream, connecting educational stages that higher education has traditionally treated as separate markets, and creating relationships before students become applicants. That is vertical integration applied to education, and it deserves far more attention from presidents, provosts, trustees, and enrollment leaders than another conversation about improving advertising conversion rates. Your university may not need to operate a K–12 school, but if it has no serious K–12 pathway strategy at all, it may be blowing it.
References
Arizona State University Preparatory Academy. (n.d.). College pathways at ASU Prep. Arizona State University. https://asuprep.asu.edu/prep-for-college/pathways/
Arizona State University Preparatory Academy. (n.d.). Prep for college. Arizona State University. https://asuprep.asu.edu/prepare-for-college/
Fink, J., & Jenkins, D. (2023). Rethinking dual enrollment as an equitable on-ramp to a career-path college degree program after high school. Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/revamping-dual-enrollment-equitable-college-degree-paths.html
Indiana University High School. (n.d.). About IU High School Online. Indiana University. https://iuhighschool.iu.edu/about/
Institute of Education Sciences. (n.d.). AIR Early College Follow-Up Efficacy Study. U.S. Department of Education. https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/awards/air-early-college-follow-efficacy-study
International Association of Laboratory Schools. (n.d.). Membership benefits. https://www.ialslaboratoryschools.org/membership
Lane, P., Falkenstern, C., & Bransberger, P. (2024). Knocking at the college door: Projections of high school graduates (11th ed.). Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. https://www.wiche.edu/knocking/
Mizzou Academy. (n.d.). Application and enrollment. University of Missouri. https://mizzouacademy.missouri.edu/application-and-enrollment/
National Center for Education Statistics. (2024). Degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by control and classification of institution and state or jurisdiction: Academic year 2022–23. U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_317.20.asp
Purdue University. (2022). Purdue Polytechnic High Schools to celebrate several firsts with upcoming graduation. Purdue University News. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2022/Q2/purdue-polytechnic-high-schools-to-celebrate-several-firsts-with-upcoming-graduation.html
Stanford Online High School. (n.d.). Admissions. Stanford University. https://ohs.stanford.edu/admissions
Tipton, K. L. (2024). College Credit Plus modality and future matriculation of high school students in Ohio. New Directions for Higher Education, 2024(205), 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/he.20475