As Colleges Struggle to Survive, Mergers Multiply, and Washington Wants to Speed Them Up

Facing declining enrollments and rising costs, colleges across the country are increasingly turning to mergers and acquisitions, a trend the Trump administration is now actively trying to accelerate by streamlining the Department’s approval process for such deals. Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent has been blunt about the stakes, warning that not all of the roughly 6,000 institutions in the U.S. will survive the decade, and anticipating that those that do will be workforce-focused and open to partnerships. Between 2000 and 2025, there were 521 college mergers or takeovers, a figure that nearly tripled over a 15-year span, driven largely by for-profit schools, though public and nonprofit institutions are increasingly in the mix. The Department of Education is working on new rules to make consolidations easier, in part because its backlog of pending ownership changes stretches back five years, and the office that handles such cases was heavily gutted in the March 2025 reduction in force. Politico reports that mergers are no guaranteed fix: research from McKinsey found that the majority of larger-school mergers actually saw declines in both enrollment and student retention afterward, even as they can offer financial stability and expanded program offerings, a tradeoff illustrated by the recently finalized merger between Northeastern University and Marymount Manhattan College.