Developed countries across world are dealing with aging problems resulting from declining fertility and mortality rates accompanied by an increasing lifespan. Population is diminishing and most visible negative changes are mainly reaching younger population. Consequently, many countries are negatively affected by structural changes in its sociodemographic patterns.

The educational network may change dramatically and previous patterns of higher education candidates will certainly be affected. Higher education institutions need to reorganize their supply accordingly with students’ demands but also with the number of applicants they can reach. In addition, national regions need to adapt demographically to the changes resulting from the displacement of students in higher education, resulting in aged interior regions and even more depopulated than at the present moment.

We evaluate the impact of demographic changes in the Portuguese higher education network employing a combination of the cohort component projection model and coherent forecasting approaches for mortality, fertility and migration, but also to forecast population based on work made by Hyndman and Booth (2008) and Hyndman et al. (2013). Additionally, we make use of Oeppen’s (2008) compositional approach to forecast students’ first higher education choices.

Independently of the university location and fields of study, we expect that universities located at large cities and closer to the coastline reveal to be more attractive and with time, lower and lower applications completed. The obtained results will not only contribute for a better understanding of students’ choices but also to evaluate the necessity of higher education network reconfiguration.

In order to accomplish our goal, we use information on the students’ choices over last recent years (2008 - 2014), including their universities/fields of study options and specific courses. The study horizon will be 2031.