Big Drop in College Enrollment
The annual student enrollment in ” higher education” has significantly diminished across America. Young student are making a concious choice not to attend College.
Undergraduate college enrollment is continuing its years-long decline, though at a much less drastic rate than during the pandemic. According to data released Thursday, Feb. 2, U.S. colleges and universities saw a drop of just 94,000 undergraduate students, or 0.6%, between the fall of 2021 and 2022. This follows a historic decline that began in the fall of 2020; over two years, more than 1 million fewer students enrolled in college.
“I certainly wouldn’t call this a recovery yet,” said Doug Shapiro, who leads the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse. “There’s bad news and good news here.”
The declines in undergrad enrollment were concentrated at four-year public schools. Private non-profit enrollment stayed essentially the same as fall 2021.
More than 1 million fewer students are enrolled in college now than before the pandemic began. According to new data released Thursday, U.S. colleges and universities saw a drop of nearly 500,000 undergraduate students in the fall of 2021. Continuing a historic decline that began the previous fall.
How we got here
Compared with the fall of 2019, the last fall semester before the coronavirus pandemic, undergraduate enrollment has fallen a total of 6.6%. That represents the largest two-year decrease in more than 50 years, Shapiro says.
The nation’s community colleges are continuing to feel the bulk of the decline, with a 13% enrollment drop over the course of the pandemic. But the fall 2021 numbers show that bachelor’s degree-seeking students at four-year colleges are making up about half of the shrinkage. In undergraduate students, a big shift from the fall of 2020, when the vast majority of the declines were among associate degree seekers.
The biggest factor for the years of decline is the strong economy. The last time U.S. college enrollment went up was 2011, at the tail end of the recession. As the economy gets better, unemployment goes down — it’s currently at 3.5 % . And more people leave college, or postpone it, and head to work.
When the recession hit a decade ago, the reverse happened: Many people, especially older adults, returned to college. That bump in college enrollment set records. And in some ways the current downturn is simply “colleges returning to more historic levels of enrollment,” Shapiro says.
U.S. demographics are also shifting. The number of high school graduates is flat — and in some cases declining — because of lower birth rates about 20 years ago. Those numbers are also projected to decline, so the trend of fewer students coming from high school isn’t going away anytime soon.
Long-term economic, social consequences
And finally, there’s the cost of college. States are putting less money into higher education, and that’s led to an increased reliance on tuition. As tuition goes up, and grants and scholarships don’t keep pace, that’s pushed the cost of college down to students and their families. Without state investment, institutions are strapped, and so are American families.
Education experts and economists are starting to think about the long-term effects if the drop continues. Some warn the decline could affect the U.S. as competing nations like China greatly increase their college attendance.
Jason Lane is the leader of the College of Education, Health and Society at Miami University in Ohio. He called it a “crisis” that is not widely recognized.
With fewer people going to college, “society is going to be less healthy,” Lane said. “It’s going to be less economically successful. It’s going to be harder to find folks to fill the jobs of the future. There will be lower tax revenues because there won’t be as many people in high-paying jobs. It will be harder for innovation to occur.”
The growing gap in educational attainment could also worsen existing divisions over politics, socioeconomic status, race and national origin, said Adriana Lleras-Muney, an economist at UCLA.
Expectations
“What does that mean for the modern American family? There are implications here that just go miles and miles and miles,” said Monty Sullivan, president of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System. “We have a million adults in this country that have stepped off the path to the middle class. That’s the real headline.”
Overall, enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012, but the pandemic turbocharged the declines at the undergrad level. When fewer students go to college, fewer students graduate, get job training and move on to higher-paying jobs, meaning all this could have huge ramifications for the U.S. economy.
“It’s very frightening,” says Doug Shapiro, who runs the nonprofit research center at the heart of the study. “Far from filling the hole of last year’s enrollment declines, we are still digging it deeper.”
“College is the best chance you have to get into well-paying jobs in this economy,” says Shapiro. “It’s not the only path, and it’s certainly not a guarantee. But it’s the best path we have right now. And so, if more students are thrown off that path, their families and communities suffer. And our economy suffers because businesses have fewer skilled workers to hire from.”
