Why Syracuse can’t attract the students it needs to pay the bills

When he was the director of international student services at Syracuse University, Juan Tavares received a regular Saturday email from the dean of admissions reporting the tally of student applications, acceptances and enrollment deposits.

Syracuse University (Unsplash)During the pandemic the numbers began to slide, so Tavares offered the admissions team seven suggestions to improve recruiting, he said. The recommendations centered on the idea that Syracuse was failing to recruit aggressively enough.

“The problem with Syracuse is that the school thinks of itself as like an Ivy, but it’s not,” Tavares said. Tavares, who no longer works at the school, said his recommendations went nowhere. In 2025, the weaknesses he had pointed out collided with President Trump’s high profile crackdown on student visas.

Syracuse’s international enrollment numbers declined by half for undergraduate and graduate students. Syracuse also failed to draw enough students overall—prompting it to offer emergency financial-aid packages to lure freshmen.

This school year, which began Aug. 24, enrollment fell short, sending the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall. Syracuse also added nearly half a billion in debt to build desperately needed new dorms, which brought on a bond market reprimand.

And it recently cut programs it said weren’t popular. A national brand-name institution with a $2.5 billion endowment and a storied 150-year tradition is suddenly beginning to flail. The problems that have long buffeted the nation’s smaller schools are now spreading to the nation’s bigger, richer universities—with midsize private schools such as Syracuse especially feeling the pinch.

Fewer young people are enrolling in college, as the country reconsiders the value of a university education. Tuition that has outpaced inflation for decades has saddled students with high debt and yielded uneven returns on careers.

The current tough job market, squeezed by the rise of artificial intelligence, has added to the anxiety. There could be even fewer students in the future—as the birthrate falls, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S.

is set to decline. The first institutions to feel these headwinds have been lesser-known colleges with nominal endowments. That has led to a surge of mergers and closings among small private schools. But the cracks in the business model of higher education are now prompting a realignment much further up the food chain.

Syracuse’s challenges are both structural and self-inflicted. It’s a private school in one of the snowiest cities in the country at a moment when students are gravitating toward public institutions in the Sunbelt. The city itself is geographically isolated, and has only recently begun to climb out of a long period of economic stagnation and to shake off a gritty reputation.

Big public flagships have risen in status nationwide and are drawing more students seeking sports and Greek life—for far less than Syracuse charges. And the NIL sports era has made it harder to compete against the deepest-pocketed behemoths.