The number of students heading to college has peaked, and institutions are still absorbing what that means.
The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that the number of U.S. high school graduates peaked in 2025 at roughly 3.9 million and will fall to about 3.4 million by 2041, a 13 percent decline driven by the drop in births that began in 2008. This is the enrollment cliff institutions have been planning for, and the Midwest and Northeast are already living it. The pool of students is smaller and will stay smaller, and no institution in those regions is going to enroll its way out of a budget gap when the students are not there to enroll. That pressure is one reason more systems are turning to course sharing.
A November 2025 analysis from The Pew Charitable Trusts found that public colleges and universities are being squeezed from three directions at once: federal funding cuts, enrollment challenges, and state budget strain. State university systems in eight states are already taking cost-cutting measures to close significant shortfalls. And when the Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed administrators who work on college finances, only 20% said their institution's budget was sufficient to achieve its mission.
Cutting programs may help close a budget gap, but it can create another problem: fewer reasons for students to choose or stay at an institution. So the harder question is the one systems and consortia are now asking: how do you keep offering students what they need using capacity you do not own? Course sharing is one answer, and it depends on visiting students being able to sign in to a partner institution's systems from the first week of class.
One of the clearest strategic responses to emerge is collaboration, and specifically course sharing. In a Chronicle of Higher Education forum on the budget crunch, Catharine Hill, president emerita of Vassar College, argued that the small colleges most at risk should work together on technology that lowers costs and makes more curricular options available to students. Rather than every institution staffing every course, systems and consortia are pooling academic capacity. A student at one campus takes the course they need at another, stays on their degree pathway, and graduates on time. The teaching institution fills seats and the home institution retains the student. Everyone stretches limited instructional dollars further.
The problem it solves is well documented. A 2024 benchmark report from scheduling software provider Ad Astra, based on data covering more than 1.3 million students, found that 57% of students could not complete their degree without a significant detour because their completion paths were missing required courses. Cutting programs to close a budget gap makes that worse, while course sharing gives students another route to the courses they need.
Deborah Adair argues that the framing should shift from course sharing to student sharing, putting access to educational opportunity at the center rather than institutional resource exchange. Systems are already putting that idea into practice. Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education now offers course sharing across its 10 universities, giving students access to courses that may not be available at their home institution.
There is also evidence that course sharing can affect retention and revenue. A white paper from course-sharing platform Acadeum, covered by Inside Higher Ed, found that 70% of Angelo State University students who participated in course sharing between 2021 and 2024 were not on track to graduate when they started. Retaining those students generated an estimated $2.85 million in additional tuition revenue.
Every version of this model makes an important assumption about the mechanics: enrollment works, support continues across institutions, and students can reach the systems they need at an institution that has never issued them a credential. Course sharing only works if students can log in.
A visiting student may need access to another institution's LMS, library resources, and student systems within days of registering. In a practical guide from the National Association of Higher Education Systems, systems reported that creating LMS logins for visiting students in a timely way was a challenge in some implementations. Multiply that across partner institutions and thousands of students, and identity and access management becomes part of the initiative's operational foundation.
The point of course sharing is to make better use of the resources institutions already have. Creating and managing local accounts for every visiting student works against that goal. Every additional account has to be provisioned, secured, supported, tracked, and eventually deprovisioned, which adds operational overhead to a model meant to stretch limited resources.
Cirrus Proxy was built for this situation. It gives people who matter to your mission but sit outside your directory, including visiting students in course sharing programs, external collaborators, and partners, secure guest access to campus resources without full local accounts. Visiting students from institutions in InCommon or another identity federation sign in through single sign-on with their home institution credentials, so your institution issues them no credentials and resets no passwords. Partners outside a federation, such as affiliated medical centers or community colleges, can connect through a Proxy Connector.
The savings a consortium projects for course sharing assume students can move between institutions without friction. Proxy removes one of the biggest sources of that friction, and as a managed cloud service, it does so without adding headcount to your IAM team, which matters at institutions where hiring is limited.
Contact us to talk through the identity side of your course sharing plans.
"A Benchmark Report: Analysis of the Relationship Between Scheduling Effectiveness, Student Progress, and Completion." Ad Astra, Feb. 2024, prnewswire.com/news-releases/time-remains-significant-barrier-to-student-success-new-data-indicate-learners-lack-clear-pathways-to-credentials-302062836.html.
"Academic Sharing." Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, www.passhe.edu/offices/asa/academic-sharing.html.
Adair, Deborah. "Course Sharing Is Student Sharing: Institutional Collaboration That Matters." Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, vol. 58, no. 2, 2026, pp. 29–35, doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2026.2642566.
Burns, Erica Price, and Zoe Almeida. Course Sharing in Action: A Practical Guide for Higher Education Systems. National Association of Higher Education Systems, Oct. 2025, pp. 20–21, nash.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Course-Sharing-in-Action-–-A-Practical-Guide-For-Higher-Education-Systems.pdf.
Forrest, Page, et al. "Higher Education's Uncertain Fiscal Future." The Pew Charitable Trusts, 12 Nov. 2025, www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/11/12/higher-educations-uncertain-fiscal-future.
"How Bad Is Higher Ed's Budget Crunch?" The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 May 2026, www.chronicle.com/article/how-bad-is-higher-eds-budget-crunch.
Lane, P., C. Falkenstern, and P. Bransberger. Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates, 11th ed., Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, Dec. 2024, www.wiche.edu/knocking.
Palmer, Kathryn. "Amid Financial Headwinds, Could Course Sharing Offer Colleges Relief?" Inside Higher Ed, 26 Mar. 2025, www.insidehighered.com/news/business/revenue-strategies/2025/03/26/course-sharing-can-boost-retention-revenue-report-finds.