By Derek Newton
Reposted from Forbes, with permission
The doomsayers of higher education are going to have to wait just a bit longer for their victory laps.
That’s because there’s new data from the National Student Clearing House Research Center – our best source for information about what’s happening in, to, and with our colleges and universities. This new information shows that undergraduate enrollment for fall of 2024 was up 3% – yes, up.
The summary of the findings says, “All sectors are seeing growth in the number of undergraduates this fall.”
That is pretty remarkable given that for years now we’ve heard little aside from the impending and certain collapse of college – how half of them were going to close, how they refused to update their technology, how they were incapable of being responsive to student needs, how they were no longer “worth it.”
Yet here we are. The market speaks. Demand for a college education is up.
As is true with any data, there are caveats. For one, this report, released in late September, is based on preliminary data for fall 2024 enrollments. The full report won’t be published until January. The sample set also represents just about half of all available data, so it’s not a headcount.
Further, college pessimists have already trumpeted the finding in the report that “freshman enrollment is declining, down 5 percent from this time last fall with public and private nonprofit 4-year institutions seeing the largest declines (-8.5% and -6.5%).”
And, as a subset of data, that’s not good. It’s obvious that drops in freshmen enrollments this year will stay on the books for five, six years at most institutions.
Still, there are a few points that make such a finding less important than it may seem when taken out of context.
The first is that, even with real declines in freshmen enrollments, overall enrollment is up 3%, which means that the increase in cohorts of older, returning students and/or dual enrollment students is quite large.
The report does not say, but this bump outside of freshmen may be another indication of the Covid bounce – the return of people who left or put off school due to Covid. If that’s even partly what this is, that’s a very big development.
The second thing that stands out related to the dip in freshmen enrollment is the nearly 9% drop at public schools. Public schools are rocks of enrollment, consistent, usually growing, highly coveted, and comparatively inexpensive. While other sectors move, publics have by and large stayed put. Accordingly, seeing an 8.5% drop in freshmen enrollment in public schools does not lead me to believe that something about public school demand has changed. It leads me to believe the data is off, and that when we have the full report, the numbers will revert to their historic mean. There is no plausible circumstance in which public schools feel an enrollment squeeze more acutely than private non-profit schools do.
We will see. But that feels right.
Also undercutting the headline value of the freshmen enrollment drop is that enrollments in community colleges are up – “associate degree (+4.3%) programs are seeing enrollment gains this fall,” the report says.
Naturally, associate degree programs serve freshmen and sophomores, so, growth among these degree programs means early college students aren’t necessarily skipping college, they may just be skipping going right into a state or private four-year school. This is good news on its own, since community colleges were flat bludgeoned with enrollment declines during the pandemic. But because associate degree programs are a vital pipeline for four-year schools, especially public schools, it’s reasonable to expect some of this growth to show up in four-year enrollments in a year or two or three.
Though it’s not directly related to the overly noted drops in freshmen, the report also finds that “The number of students pursuing shorter-term credentials is continuing to grow rapidly, with enrollment in undergraduate certificate programs increasing 7.3 percent.”
Again, the report does not say or speculate, but it’s at least possible that some students who may have otherwise been freshmen in a four-year school are signing up for these shorter-term credential programs instead.
And while reasonable people can disagree as to whether that’s good or bad, for school health and vitality, it’s fine. Since these short, career focused programs can cycle more students than a traditional degree, and because they are often highly profitable and easily marketable, most schools are probably delighted to see them grow – even if it’s at some measurable cost to degree enrollments.
These shifts and flows in enrollment are important now because many experts and observers are still predicting a “demographic cliff,” as fewer 18-year-old students are eligible for college, starting around 2026. Original estimates for the cliff predicted a decline of 15% of these students over five years. Though some predictions have begun to soften estimates, in the face of a 3% annual decline, growing 3% now is a pretty big deal. Another year of similar growth before 2026 could move the demographic cliff to demographic foothill – especially considering enrollment was up last year too.
If this interim report turns out to be solid and the January number shows around 3% growth in undergraduate students, the two-year total growth in undergraduate admissions will be around 5%.
That may not be enormous. But it is real. And it does not reconcile with the death march that higher education is supposed to be on. In the real world, real people who are making decisions about their money and their futures – they are voting on the future of college and higher education. And they are increasingly voting yes.
