- On EdTech Newsletter
- Posts
- About Those Enrollment Numbers
About Those Enrollment Numbers
The headline numbers on freshman declines may be premature, and a further look at dual enrollments
Phil Hill
October 29, 2024
Due to the general importance of the first topic (freshman enrollment declines in US higher education), that section is presented above the paywall.
Last week we finally saw initial enrollment estimates in US higher education for Fall 2024, leading to better insight into the impact of the FAFSA fiasco. Overall enrollment up 3%, freshman enrollment down 5% was the headline, as described in the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) release.
However, this is the first time since 2020 that first-year (freshman) enrollment has declined.
“It is startling to see such a substantial drop in freshmen, the first decline since the start of the pandemic in 2020 when they plunged nearly 10%,” said Doug Shapiro, Executive Director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
That lede was picked up across the board - Brookings, AEI, NY Times, NCAN, Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle, Education Dive, etc, etc. In my initial coverage, I noted the lede and also pointed out the shift from full-time to part-time embedded in the numbers.
Thanks to reader Gates Bryant from Tyton Partners, I now see that the headline story might be premature. It turns out that for every year that NSC has released mid-term enrollment estimates (since 2020), the final end-of-term numbers revise the freshman enrollment up by 3 - 6%. Always up. In other words, it is entirely feasible that freshman enrollment in Fall 2024 might not have such a huge drop when all is said and done.
We anticipated that FAFSA delays would result in Freshman students opting to go to their cheaper, local community college where affordable tuition would be guaranteed. This has born out with Public, 2-year institutions being more insulated from Freshman declines (-3.1% drop in full-time, but an increase in part-time 2.2%).
However, NSC is consistently way off on freshman enrollment in their early fall reporting (“Stay Informed”) -- average of 4.6 percentage point difference between Stay Informed and CTEE which comes out in the Spring from 2021-23, and were consistently too negative in the Stay Informed reports over that span. If the same trend holds true this year, NSC's more precise estimate of freshman enrollment change will be less drastic of a decline.
I checked the data, and I think this reading from Tyton makes a lot of sense. If NSC freshman enrollment estimates are off by similar levels, the real story of Fall 2024 will be a shift of freshman enrollment from 4-year towards cheaper 2-year institutions rather than a large decline. A few notes to add:
The same pattern held in 2020 as well. The mid-term estimates showed a 16.1% drop in freshman enrollment but the end-of-term numbers revised up to a 13.1% drop. By the following year, however, NSC further revised (see p. 5) the Fall 2020 freshman enrollment to show a 9.5% drop, due to the correction of a weighting error for 2015-2020. This explains Shapiro’s reference to “plunged nearly 10%.”
The biggest freshman drop by institution type was for four-year institutions with a high percentage of Pell-eligible students (more than 10%). This will further concentrate low-income students in 2-year institutions and away from 4-year institutions.
None of this argues that the FAFSA fiasco was and is not a major problem, but it is important to understand what the numbers actually reflect. And to take into account noise in the data - expect important updates by January.
