WARN Feed · layoffs by industry

US university, college, school and education layoffs — the actual WARN Act filings, rebuilt every day

1,165 education layoff and closing notices filed with state labour agencies under the WARN Act, from 1988 to 2026, covering 90,670 reported workers at 656 employers in 42 states. Free, CC BY 4.0, rebuilt every morning from the agency portals — no login, no key, no email.

Download every sector-tagged notice (CSV) This industry as its own dataset on Hugging Face

Who is in this cut

Included: universities and colleges, for-profit career schools and their campuses, private and charter schools, school districts where a state chose to publish them, Head Start and childcare providers, school-bus and campus contractors, and education publishers and online-learning companies.

What counts as education here: the employer name reads as school, university, college, academy, institute, campus, education, learning, childcare, Head Start, preschool, seminary or a named chain (University of Phoenix, DeVry, ITT Tech, Corinthian, Art Institute, Kaplan, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Bright Horizons, KinderCare, Chegg, Coursera and others). Read this before quoting a public-sector total: the federal WARN Act does not cover public employers, so a public school district or state university appears here only where a state law or a voluntary filing put it on that state's portal — this file is mostly private, for-profit and non-profit education, plus the contractors (school-bus operators, campus food service, childcare chains) that serve public schools. The word institute also catches research and policy institutes, and learning catches corporate training firms; sector_rule marks each. A college trading under a founder's name reveals no sector and is not here; it is in the unclassified remainder of the sector dataset. Every row keeps the sector_rule that fired.

Why this file exists

Campus closures and for-profit college collapses are covered as education policy, and the layoff filings behind them — which campus, which town, how many staff, notice date, effective date, closure or layoff — sit on 48 separate state portals and are never assembled as one education series. This file is that series, with the closure/layoff split the states themselves recorded.

The employers with the most education notices on record

Counted per notice, not per event: a company that files in four states files four notices. Employer names are the resolved spelling — the raw agency spelling is kept in the download.

The 15 most recent education notices

Date is the notice date where the agency publishes one, otherwise the layoff date. 343 of the 1,165 notices in this cut are recorded as a closure rather than a layoff.

How the industry is decided: no state WARN portal publishes an industry field, so there is no NAICS column to filter on. The sector here is assigned from the resolved employer name by a published rule table (19 sectors, 3,152 patterns, first match wins), and every row carries the pattern that fired in its sector_rule column so you can audit or re-cut it. The archive holds 61,428 notices; 61,232 of them carry a usable date and are in the sector file (196 have no date in either column), 32,168 come out with a sector, and 29,064 stay unclassified — and are still counted in every total shown anywhere on this site. Manual audit 2026-09-12: 4 of 60 sampled rows were assigned to the wrong sector. Rebuilt 2026-09-24.

How to check any of this

Every number on this page is computed at build time from notices_by_sector.csv (one row per notice, with the sector and the rule that assigned it), and the yearly series from sector_by_year.csv. The free HTTP API serves the whole archive as JSON, NDJSON and per-state CSV with no key. This industry is also published as its own Hugging Face dataset, and the full sector cut as one file. If a number here disagrees with the file, the file is right and it is a bug — tell us and it is fixed the next morning.

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