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Friday Follow Up
Further ideas to understand Fall enrollment and AV-funded direct action against OPM rev share models
Phil Hill
September 20, 2024
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Following up from ongoing On EdTech coverage, sharing what we’re learning.
Fall 2024 Enrollment Surprises
As Morgan and I look forward, we keep seeing more anecdotes of record enrollments for Fall 2024, which goes against the FAFSA Fiasco grain, particularly for incoming students.
What is going on? Many analysts (myself included) had thought we would see significant enrollment drops for Fall 2024, largely due to FAFSA, and that could still happen in aggregate across the US. But there are so many examples of increasing or even record enrollment that it appears something has changed in enrollment models.
A regular reader pointed out some examples that show this dichotomy between incoming vs. total enrollment as well as have vs. have not institutions, highlighting this article about Philadelphia institutions. The example of Temple University really stood out for me.
Temple’s first-year enrollment rose nearly 30% to 4,926 students and, notably, among that boost is a 71% uptick in Black students, raising the number to 1,456. That’s a 605-student increase from last year. Temple, one of four state-related universities in Pennsylvania, in recent years had faced criticism for enrolling smaller percentages of Black students.
Overall, Temple’s enrollment just cleared 30,000, which is down by 1.7% from last year. University officials are heartened that the dip is much lower than last year, when enrollment had dropped by 9.2%. Still, Temple’s enrollment has fallen dramatically from its all-time high of 40,240 in fall 2017.
