More public and private two-year and four-year colleges closed or merged between 2019-20 and 2020-21 than was true for for-profit institutions, a change from recent trends. The number of colleges and universities eligible to award federal financial aid fell to 6,063 in the just completed 2020-21 academic year, down from 6,145 in 2019-20 and 6,642 in 2017-18. Closures of for-profit colleges and universities (across the board, from those certificate-granting institutions to those that award bachelor's degrees) accounted for about three-quarters of the 579 institutions that disappeared over that three-year period.
