Friday Follow Up

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Welcome back to Friday Follow Up, where we review updates to recent On EdTech coverage and highlight relevant news of the week. Well, the news has been light this week, but there’s new information to consider.

Enrollment Misunderstandings

Follow up to “About Those Enrollment Numbers.”

Insights into enrollment numbers for US higher education are of growing importance for student outcomes, institutional health, and EdTech market opportunities. But it is surprising how often basic misunderstandings seem to gain traction.

On Monday, I covered how the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) mid-term numbers have consistently been too low in for freshman changes. The news headlines can lead people to assume enrollment declines for this category are 3 - 6% lower than the less-reported updates at the end of the term. Meaning that the headline freshmen enrollment dropped 5% for Fall 2024 might be wrong if the data trend is consistent this year.

Long-time readers might recall that this is not the first time I have called out anomalies in the NSC data on enrollment changes. In January 2023, I noted a growing discrepancy between NSC estimates and subsequent IPEDS data, with the latter based on a census with full data per institution, and thus more reliable although not as timely. Differences of more than one million students since 2018.

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