By McKenzie Romero | Editor
The change is happening slowly, but across the country the number of college-age adults is shrinking, and fewer of them trust higher education.
As these demographic shifts continue, researchers are telling Utah’s schools to prepare now to help offset the losses to their student bodies — and their budgets.
In today’s Dispatch we recap the recommendations about facing coming shifts in higher ed enrollment, the U.S. Supreme Court’s block on new vote-by-mail restrictions this election, and the clock ticking on wolves’ status as an endangered species.
“This data is exactly why this approach is critical now, and that’s why I think you see other states scrambling to try and rethink how their state systems are operating, because they see the same numbers and they see the same data and they see the same problem.” — Utah Commissioner of Higher Education Geoffrey Landward on the need for Utah schools to prepare now for demographic shifts.
Utah State University’s Old Main is pictured on Oct. 8, 2024. (Photo by Kelly Winter for Utah News Dispatch)
By Alixel Cabrera
A declining fertility rate isn’t the only factor at play in Utah’s college attendance prospects. The share of students enrolling in a public Utah colleges within three years of high school graduation has also been in decline for the last few years, going from 56.7% in 2019 to 51.7% in 2025, according to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
According to data from the Utah System of Higher Education, Utah universities and colleges lost about 7,000 students out of the 2023 cohort. Keeping those students enrolled would help balance out the demographic dip, the institute found among its recommendations for navigating the change.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
DC BUREAU
By Jacob Fischler
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday kept in place a lower court’s order blocking President Donald Trump’s embattled plan to place new restrictions on mail ballots for this year’s midterm elections. Two of the court’s stalwart conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented from the decision.
The majority’s unsigned, one-paragraph order upheld a Massachusetts federal court’s injunction until after Nov. 3 on a U.S. Postal Service rule that codifies technical requirements on the envelopes carrying ballots and requires states to collect and send to the federal government lists of eligible voters.
A gray wolf in snow. (File photo courtesy of Eric Cole/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
IDAHO CAPITAL SUN
By Clark Corbin
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Sept. 4 giving the U.S. secretary of interior 90 days to decide whether to remove Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves and Mexican wolves in the United States.
The executive order also calls for Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum to prepare a legislative recommendation for Trump to fully delist or downlist wolves and, upon determination that recovery criteria have been met, encourage states to delist wolves and revise state standards for the killing of wolves in order to help ranchers.
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