Bigger colleges have been quietly capturing an outsized share of the nation’s students for more than a decade, but a new report suggests that growth has little to do with students simply wanting a larger campus.
The study, published by the TIAA Institute and authored by Ricardo Azziz, Richard Katzman, Gary Stocker, and Karla Leeper of the Center for Higher Education Mergers and Acquisitions, surveyed nearly 1,500 prospective undergraduate and graduate students in July 2025 through a partnership with Hanover Research. The researchers set out to explain a puzzling trend: while enrollment at most types of colleges has declined since 2011, in some cases by as much as a third, institutions with 20,000 or more students grew by roughly 19%, adding more than three-quarters of a million students over the same period.
The obvious explanation, that students simply prefer big schools, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Sixty-three percent of respondents said an institution’s size was at least moderately influential in deciding where to apply. But when asked to rank the five factors that mattered most in choosing where to enroll, only 12% put size on that list. Cost, financial aid, program flexibility and academic quality all ranked well above it.
Those priorities showed up clearly elsewhere in the survey. Forty-four percent of respondents said overall value for the cost was a top consideration, followed by financial aid packages (41%), flexible program formats such as online or part-time study (39%), and academic quality (39%). About a third weighed post-graduation job prospects heavily.
Size preference itself skewed toward the middle of the range, not the top. Sixty-seven percent of respondents favored medium-sized institutions of 1,000 to 9,999 students, and 42% favored large schools of 10,000 to 19,999. Only 14% said they’d prefer a very large university of 20,000-plus students, barely more than the 18% who preferred schools under 1,000 students.
Among students who did lean toward larger institutions, the appeal centered on breadth rather than scale for its own sake. Roughly a third cited more program and course options, better job or internship opportunities, greater campus resources, and richer social and extracurricular life as their reasons. Students who preferred smaller schools instead pointed to smaller class sizes, closer relationships with faculty, more personalized attention and less crowded campuses.
“These findings suggest that the continued enrollment growth of very large colleges and universities is not simply a matter of students preferring bigger institutions,” the report’s authors wrote. “Rather, larger institutions appear to be competing effectively across multiple dimensions that students value, including cost, program options, academic quality, flexibility, and career opportunities.”
The authors frame that as a warning for smaller institutions, particularly those competing directly with larger rivals for the same pool of applicants. With college-age populations shrinking, costs climbing, and public confidence in the value of a degree already under strain, the report argues that smaller schools can’t rely on their traditional selling points alone. They’ll need to make a sharper case for their value on the same terms, cost, flexibility, academic quality and career outcomes, that are now driving students toward the largest institutions.
The report, Student Preference for Size of Colleges and Universities, appears in the TIAA Institute’s Trends and Issues series.
