Penn, Drexel Pump The Brakes On Real Estate Expansions As Higher Ed Enrollment Drops

College enrollment rates are expected to drop nationwide in the coming years, and University City institutions have taken note.

Real estate leaders at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania say they are slowing down their expansions in West Philadelphia and adopting a maintenance mindset after years of high-profile construction projects.

“There’s just fewer students going to school,” Anthony Bracali, Drexel associate vice president for planning, design and construction, said Tuesday during Bisnow’s Philadelphia Education Real Estate Conference at the Hilton Philadelphia at Penn's Landing.

“Many colleges and universities are fighting that trend right now,” he added.

While doubts about higher education and the large amount of debt it often requires are increasingly common among younger generations, historic birth rates are also a major part of the equation.

Students born during an uptick ahead of the 2008 financial crisis have been keeping many institutions afloat, Bloomberg reported. Nearly two decades later, that baby boom is burning off in the form of lower college enrollment.

The total number of annual U.S. high school graduates peaked in 2025 and is expected to decline by 13% through 2041, according to Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education data cited by the College Board.

Even coveted institutions like Penn, which had the seventh-largest endowment in the nation last year, are pulling back.

“There’s a shift in focus of investing in our new facilities to ensure they continue to meet and perform to this current standard of education and research,” Penn Senior Vice President of Facilities and Real Estate Anne Papageorge said.

Other schools in Pennsylvania were absorbed by larger institutions or have shuttered altogether. 

Cabrini University shut down in 2024 and offloaded its Radnor campus to nearby Villanova University. 

In West Philly, the University of the Sciences campus was absorbed by St. Joseph’s University in 2022. That real estate was then sold to student housing developer Michael Karp’s nonprofit, Belmont Neighborhood Educational Alliance, last year.

That move drew the ire of the neighborhood’s council member, Jamie Gauthier, who proposed an overlay requiring community and Planning Commission oversight when colleges try to sell large tracts of land. The city council passed the proposal via a 16-1 vote in December, but Mayor Cherelle Parker elected to take no action on it the following month.

Drexel has shifted its mindset following years of rapid expansion and high-profile public-private partnerships under former President John Fry, who is now leading Temple University.

“We’ve been really focused on resizing and thinking about our footprint,” Bracali said.

Bracali said deferred maintenance is a major focus of his, but it isn’t a popular topic among the school’s donors. Drexel is now in the process of reducing its lease load and consolidating its office space.

He drew a parallel between this activity and the way many corporations shrank their office footprints in the wake of the pandemic.

“Institutions are always trailing what corporate America is doing,” he said.

But Bracali said Drexel remains dedicated to providing quality physical spaces for its student population.

He said the goal is to “do things that are student-focused and student life-focused to try to reposition ourselves.”