Waiting for those college acceptance letters is likely to become much less stressful in the coming years. The reason? The high school student pool is shrinking rapidly.

As Conor Sen writes in Bloomberg, Millennials are aging out of their college years, and not only that, but the number of high school graduates is beginning to shrink. Added together, it’s likely that the number of college applications is likely to drop significantly.

In 2008, the recession caused a drop in birth rates, which means 2026 will see the number of college-aged students drop up to 15 percent. (This is not, of course, accounting for the pool of non-traditional students who may or may not enroll in higher education institutions.)

The recent book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education suggests that in the Northeast and Midwest, where demographics are aging even faster, the crises might be even more severe.

What does this mean for students? Ultimately, colleges will have to loosen their standards for acceptance to remain financially solvent.

As Sen puts it, “All of this will be painful for institutions of higher ed, but just the opposite for people who want to go to college.”