Photo: John Phelan

For decades, Bay State College has welcomed students to classes in a swanky, marble-floored office building in downtown Boston. But only a trickle of students arrived for classes last week, following news that the college could lose its accreditation—and its ability to award degrees—by summer.

Students say they are stunned by the for-profit school's demise. Higher education analysts have a different reaction.

After struggling as an undergraduate at University of California, Irvine, Andrea Mora is now the school's director of basic needs and tasked with supervising various services that the university provides to students whose backgrounds and life stories are much like her own: students from low-income or immigrant backgrounds; first in their families to attend college; Black, Hispanic or Indigenous, or BIPOC.

Mora's position is slowly becoming more common, as colleges and universities invest in hiring directors of basic needs to address growing food and housing insecurity among students.

American colleges and universities face a big challenge: plummeting enrollments. For all higher education institutions, but particularly for small colleges, that enrollment cliff spells trouble.

On this episode of On Point, higher ed leaders and policy experts discuss the future of small colleges—and how they'll survive.