Skip to main content
Portland Public Schools enrolled about 150 more students than Portland State University anticipated it would in the 2025–26 school year. Yet an annual report by PSU’s Population Research Center continues to project long-term enrollment loss in Oregon’s largest school district.
In the most recent school year, PPS enrolled 42,622 students. PSU forecasts that number will fall to 36,763 by 2035–36, a decline of nearly 14%. That’s news that district officials are well aware of, and consequential because those numbers heavily influence PPS budgeting decisions.
The figures are slightly more optimistic than last year’s forecast, based on the district’s 2024–25 enrollment, which projected the district would enroll 36,405 students in 10 years. That’s in part because, while the district reported 753 fewer students in the latest academic year, it did see an unexpected uptick in kindergartners. The district enrolled almost 200 more kindergartners than forecasts predicted it would.
Still, both declining birth rates and out-migration will continue to affect how many students reside within PPS’s boundaries. Demographers write that in order to keep its enrollment steady, the district must try to capture a larger share of kindergarten and first grade students over the coming decade. In other words, it will have to compete more fiercely against private and homeschool alternatives.
PPS currently boasts a 74% kindergarten capture rate and a 74.4% overall capture rate. In 2015, it captured 82.2% of students across the district.
Perhaps most notable in this year’s report is the finding that the peak of PPS’s high school enrollment seems to have come and gone. (Officials have started sounding the alarm around middle school enrollment). While elementary schools struggled with pandemic-related enrollment loss, demographers wrote that PPS’s high schools fared relatively well, seeing their highest enrollment in 20 years in the 2022–23 school year, and that enrollment had remained stable in later years.
“However, between the fall of 2024 and the fall of 2025, total enrollment declined by more than 200 students,” the report reads. “This sudden shift marks the onset of a period of decline in high school enrollment, driven by smaller elementary and middle school cohorts that began in 2013 and are now reaching high school.”
This fall, district officials will begin a school consolidation conversation, looking to close up to 10 elementary and middle schools across the district. At the same time, construction began this summer on two of three high schools Portland voters approved for overhauls, and construction for Ida B. Wells High School is set to begin this coming winter.
District officials have said that each of PPS’s nine high schools need at least 1,100 students to operate effectively. It will be cutting close to those numbers by 2035–36, when each campus would hold about 1,280 students if students were distributed evenly among them. Currently, several high schools enroll more than 1,600 students. Grant, the district’s largest, enrolled more than 2,000 last year.
WW has previously examined the consequences of running more schools than a district’s enrollment warrants. Experts have warned that thinly spreading operating funds across a portfolio of underutilized buildings can limit student opportunities (“Too Many High Schools,” WW, March 19, 2025).
The enrollment problem extends well beyond PPS. A Multnomah County forecast released Aug. 11 indicated school-aged children would be on the decline across the county as well.
