BREAKING: Freshman Enrollment Did Not Drop in Fall 2024

NSC confirms that it undercounts freshman enrollment, as first reported here

Author

Phil Hill
January 13, 2025

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The big news this fall was that Freshman enrollment in US higher education dropped by 5% in Fall 2024 despite gains in other categories, likely due to the FAFSA Fiasco. This was driven by the Stay Informed series from National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). We reported here at On EdTech on October 29th that this narrative might be premature and wrong. To my knowledge, this was the only reporting calling this out. But credit where credit is due, Tyton Partners was the source for our reporting.

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.

Today, NSC released a notice that it found the error, and that it now appears that Freshman Enrollment actually increased, not decreased. The error was even bigger than forecast by Tyton. From the press release [emphasis added]:

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center today released a statement from Executive Director Doug Shapiro about an error affecting the freshman enrollment data in its October preliminary fall enrollment report:

“The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has identified a methodological error affecting its calculation of freshman enrollment in the preliminary enrollment report released in October 2024. That report, called the Stay Informed Report, is based on data provided by 50 percent of higher education institutions. The error in research methodology caused the mislabeling of certain students as dual-enrolled rather than as freshmen, and as a result, the number of freshmen was undercounted, and the number of dual-enrolled was overcounted. The error also affected the Special Analysis of 18-year-old Freshmen report released in November.”

“Our subsequent research finds freshman enrollment increased this fall. The Research Center will release its Current Term Enrollment Estimates report on January 23 – this report is not based on preliminary data, encompasses nearly all institutions of higher education, and uses different methodologies to determine freshman enrollees.”

The accompanying document shows that this error has affected previous Stay Informed reports, which explains the point above that NSC routinely underestimates Freshmen enrollment.

Did the methodology error impact all previous Stay Informed reports? Previous reports were also affected by the methodology error, but the effect was magnified this year because more high school students participated in dual enrollment programs.

Was there an error with the underlying Research Center data? No, the error was solely within the methodology used by the Research Center to estimate the number of freshmen for the preliminary fall enrollment report.

How will you address this methodology error in future Stay Informed reports? The Research Center is assessing the methodology used in the Stay Informed reports and will not publish the next Stay Informed report until the revised methodology has been thoroughly vetted.

I will note that NSC is currently scrubbing their website and Tableau public reporting to remove all references to the Freshmen enrollment drop (which makes sense, to avoid people linking to the erroneous reporting). This link to the headline story is now a dead link (404 error), where it previously made the decline the centerpiece story.

I’ll repeat what I shared in the October post.

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. [snip]

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.

Well, we now have the first part of that January update. The final report in two weeks should give a number to how large the increase actually was.

Thanks again to Gates Bryant and Tyton Partners, and thanks to Bryan Alexander for the heads up on the story today. And kudos to NSC for recognizing the error and calling it out.

Stay tuned for more analysis.

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