OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — The chancellor of the Peralta Community College District proposed last year merging Merritt College with Laney College to create Oakland City College. Merritt College has experienced an extended decline in full-time student enrollment and has implemented cutbacks.

Merritt College moved to its current Oakland site in the early 1970s from its former campus in North Oakland, where Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton met and later founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

The proposed consolidation followed a period of contraction across American higher education. At least sixteen nonprofit colleges and universities announced they would close last year, and seven announced they would merge with or be acquired by other schools. In 2022, Mills College merged with Northeastern University and became Mills College at Northeastern University.

A 2012 report by Bain & Company declared that roughly a third of American colleges were financially unsustainable. A 2024 working paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia warned that a fifteen-percent enrollment drop could lead to the closures of up to eighty colleges and universities, with the most pain at small regional private schools.

After peaking in 2007, the number of babies born annually in America declined for more than a decade. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that the number of high-school graduates will be down thirteen percent by the end of 2041, with some states, including Hawaii, Illinois, California, and New York, potentially seeing their populations of high-school graduates drop by more than twenty-five percent. The number of high-school graduates who pursue a higher degree has been dropping due in part to high tuition costs.

"We are eighteen years into a drought of births. The babies not born in 2025 will not be showing up in college recruitment pools in 2043," said Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College. "You'd need record-smashing attendance rates to maintain the size of incoming student cohorts," he added.

The University of Vermont reported an expected fifteen-percent drop in incoming freshmen for the 2026-27 school year and a seven-percent drop in overall enrollment. President Marlene Tromp cited demographic decline and a scarcity of international students due to the Trump Administration's visa policies as issues affecting enrollment. The university charges more than $46,000 per year for out-of-state tuition, and approximately three-quarters of its undergraduates come from out of state.