California’s schools are emptying out. Experts say it’s only going to get worse.

The first sign was the empty desks that slowly started to appear.

Then there were fewer kindergartners in San Francisco. Shrinking graduating classes in San Jose. An Oakland elementary school that lost so many students it was forced to close.

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Across California, signs like these have proliferated as what once looked like isolated enrollment dips have quietly turned into something much bigger: a demographic transformation that’s now reshaping public education across the country. Year after year, class rosters get shorter until they’re impossible to ignore.

“It’s been on the downward trend since I started. It’s never been drastic from one year to the next, but when you add up the numbers … that adds up over time,” William Chavez, a social studies teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Los Angeles, told SFGATE.

Just this school year, California’s kindergarten through 12th grade public schools enrolled nearly 75,000 fewer students than the year before, according to state data. And over the past decade, California has 420,000 fewer public school students, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, which means less money for the public school system. Driven by a range of factors including lower birth rates, families moving to more affordable areas and immigration crackdowns, the declines are spreading to inner cities, suburbs, rural communities and even fast-growing areas across the country that once seemed immune to demographic slowdown (even Texas, which has drawn California transplants, enrolled 76,000 fewer students in the 2025-26 school year than the prior year).

“This is happening everywhere. … There are very few districts that aren’t experiencing it,” Michael Kirst, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and former president of the California State Board of Education, told SFGATE.

For California school districts already struggling with budget deficits, labor costs and lingering pandemic learning loss, the enrollment drop is exacerbating these problems, and researchers say the decline looks like it’ll be the new normal.

Where are the students?

Education researchers say the biggest driver behind shrinking schools is that Americans are having fewer children. Birth rates in the United States have been on a steady decline since 2007, data from the , and the effects of the drop are now becoming visible in the public school system.

“The thing is with public school enrollment, it operates on a lag,” Julien Lafortune, a researcher with the PPIC, told SFGATE. “The kids in kindergarten now were born five, six years ago.”

According to the  there were 3.6 million U.S. births in 2025, a 16% drop from the recorded in 2007. The domino effect in the nation’s education system has resulted in fewer and fewer students each year. And when COVID-19 hit, it just accelerated a problem that officials had long foreseen.    

“Before the pandemic, the state Department of Finance had predicted declines that would come over the next decade or two,” Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, told SFGATE.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there was a historic 2.7% decrease in enrollment at the start of the fall 2020 school year across the country and a 0.2% drop in the teacher to student ratio, except in Nevada, Florida and Ohio.

For a while, districts hoped the declines, driven by homeschooling, private schools or families delaying kindergarten during the chaos of the pandemic, were temporary and that enrollment would eventually rebound. But researchers say the data no longer supports that explanation.

“Statewide, private and homeschooling didn’t seem to explain a big chunk of the enrollment declines,” Noguera said. “A lot of it seems to really be about this underlying demographic trend.”

Now, PPIC’s Lafortune said the declining birth rates and subsequent enrollment need to be recognized as the new normal.

“We’re not really in the shadow of the pandemic anymore,” Lafortune said. “… It’s not suddenly private schools siphoning all this enrollment away.”

Why the Bay Area and urban cities are being hit hard

A recent PPIC report on declining enrollment found nearly two-thirds of California districts lost students over the past year, with some of the steepest declines concentrated in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and coastal California. Public school enrollment in the Bay Area has dropped by 10.4% since 2015 and is expected to decline another 9.7% through 2035.

Stanford’s Kirst said a primary driver of the drop is that younger families increasingly cannot afford to live in cities like San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, pushing many inland or out of state entirely. The trend has illustrated how California’s affordability crisis is colliding with demographic decline.

“California has an added problem of the cost of housing, which is especially high in urban areas,” Kirst said. “Families with children can’t afford to live there.”

Lafortune also said the pattern reflects “affordability issues” because many people are moving away from the Bay Area to Sacramento and the Central Valley.

The populations in these regions are booming, and schools are seeing higher enrollments, with a 4.1% increase since 2015 in the San Joaquin Valley and a 4.6% increase in the Sacramento metro area, according to the PPIC report. The northern Central Valley had the biggest enrollment boom, with a 5.5% increase, and in the Fresno and Clovis area, a new school recently opened with a $600 million price tag to accommodate the large number of students.

Still, even in the areas currently experiencing growth, experts say the trend is unlikely to continue indefinitely. The PPIC report projected that over the next decade, no region in California will experience long-term increasing enrollment.

“It looks like just about every region will experience at least some level of decline,” Noguera said. “Or probably not as much growth.”

The affordability crisis is not only taking students out of urban school districts but is also putting a damper on the students who stay, Chavez said. Even for the families who remain at schools with declining enrollment, soaring housing costs can create instability that affect students’ learning.

“Students are leaving and the ones who are here we are trying to support,” he said. “… We see it in the classroom when there’s very little motivation to learn, which is completely understandable. When a student doesn’t know where they’re going to sleep the next evening, how can I expect them to learn whatever topic we’re studying?”

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Trends in the state’s large multilingual and immigrant population are also playing an outsized role. As U.S. President Donald Trump has cracked down on immigration enforcement this year, anxious families are deciding whether to even send their children to school.

“There are bigger declines among English learner students,” Lafortune said.

A separate PPIC analysis on multilingual enrollment declines found California lost about 372,000 multilingual learners between 2015 and 2023. “Our population has a big share of immigrants or people born outside of the United States, and so we’re more sensitive in that sense to changes in immigration,” Lafortune said.

Noguera echoed that sentiment, saying that those immigration shifts have become increasingly important because California schools historically depended on immigrant families to sustain enrollment growth.

Closures, layoffs and political fights

Because school funding is closely tied to attendance and enrollment, shrinking classrooms can quickly spiral into budget crises. Districts facing long-term declines are increasingly confronting layoffs, hiring freezes and school closures, such as the San Francisco Unified District, which is operating with a multimillion dollar budget deficit.

A report by Noguera and Alvin Makori on shrinking enrollment from Getting Down to Facts, an independent research project out of Stanford University, revealed that 630 California schools have closed since 2015. The report argues that enrollment decline has become “a governance problem” for districts forced into politically painful decisions about which campuses survive.  

In March, for example, the San Jose Unified School District decided to close five schools. Families in the district alleged that the schools the district chose to close will disproportionately affect minority students.

“School closures are always very controversial,” Kirst said. Kirst also noted that in some neighborhoods, such as the area by USC where he works, schools built during California’s postwar population boom are now operating far below capacity.

“Within 2 miles of [USC] there are probably seven high schools, all of which are vastly underenrolled, built for over 2,000 students, and none of them have more than 500 now,” Kirst said.

The closures also directly affect its educators, Chavez added. He said the Los Angeles Unified School District’s staffing, like most district budgets across the state, is tied to enrollment. Fewer students then results in budget cuts and fewer teachers.

“We’re talking people who have taken their time and energy to build relationships with our students and then they’re no longer there,” he said. “A concerning thing is you’re going to see a lot of good educators, people who are in this with their hearts, leave the profession.”

Lafortune said districts that proactively prepare for decline, rather than waiting for fiscal emergencies, may ultimately fare better academically and politically. He pointed to Napa County, which framed consolidation around investing more deeply in remaining students rather than simply cutting costs. Education officials created mental health services and wellness centers for high school students, for example.

“They really tried to frame it as: we’re closing a school, but we’re using the savings to do more,” he said. “It wasn’t about doing less.”

A strange upside

Buried inside the enrollment crisis is one unexpected benefit from the decline: Fewer students could eventually mean more resources per child if state education funding remains stable. The challenge, though, is deciding what to do with those resources.

“What’s the right way to actually use that money?” Lafortune said.

Policymakers and school leaders will have to make difficult choices about whether they should preserve aging school systems or consolidate campuses and invest more aggressively in tutoring, smaller class sizes and academic recovery.

Currently, the funding for public schools remains unpredictable. The latest 2026-27 budget proposal from Gov. Gavin Newsom calls for less money for education, temporarily withholding $3.9 billion voter-approved education funds, prompting concerns from educators and administrators.

Schools throughout the country have also lost federal relief funds, which varied between state and district, but helped the campuses survive the pandemic woes. In March 2025, the U.S. Department of Education rescinded more than $2.5 billion in funds that were helping close budget shortfalls exacerbated by COVID-19. Chavez said even his district, which is the second-largest in the country, receives an “extended amount” of resources but officials need to think deeper.

“That’s like a Band-Aid. The funding is essential and it’s still not getting to what I believe is the root cause, which is affordability and lack of affordable housing in the city,” he said.

Higher education could be next

Experts say the demographic slide likely will not stop at K-12 schools.

Elite institutions like Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UCLA are unlikely to struggle for applicants anytime soon because of their international prestige and massive applicant pools, but the outlook is far murkier for schools that rely more heavily on local and regional student pipelines. Last year, Sonoma State University, Cal State East Bay and San Francisco State University announced they would combine certain operational services amid painful budget cuts brought by shrinking enrollment.

“The elite big schools like USC and UCLA won’t feel it now,” Kirst said. “But you’re seeing many Cal States and community colleges already experience it.”

That pressure is already emerging across parts of California’s public higher education system as the number of high school graduates slowly shrinks. According to a 2024 analysis from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a nonprofit research organization, the number of high school graduates was expected to peak in 2025 and then decline by 13%, or nearly half a million, through 2041 because of fewer births throughout the country.

As fewer high school graduates seek a university education in the coming years, Kirst said those schools may increasingly find themselves competing for a smaller pool of applicants. Fewer prospective students for colleges mean less tuition revenue and reduced state funding, putting on the line everything from staffing to academic programs and even whether some campuses can remain financially sustainable long term.

Over the next decade, higher education officials in California will have to rethink how to keep these schools afloat, looking beyond the traditional pipeline of high school graduates to attract transfer students, adult learners and out-of-state applicants while maintaining programs built around a generation of California students that is steadily getting smaller. And for the grade schools, where the education journey begins, Chavez said he believes district and government officials should need to come up with “creative” solutions, rather than just cutting down spending.

“When enrollment declines, austerity isn’t the solution. It does more harm than good,” he said. “… [We can’t] just keep doing things the way we were used to because now we’re in this. I feel like there’s a sense of urgency that we need to start building, funding,whatever it is, but cuts isn’t the solution.”

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