New Information on Two Newsletter Themes
Confirming our coverage that fall 25 enrollment is up, and sharing another casualty of the ROI mindset
Phil Hill
November 11, 2025
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Two news stories that came out today augment themes that we’ve been covering: Fall 2025 enrollments in US higher education and the unintended consequences of the Earnings Premium mindset.
Confirming of Fall 25 Enrollment Gains
Our On EdTech+ coverage since Sept. 15 that Fall ’25 would look better than the doomers predicted - strong first-year pipelines, community colleges and short-cycle programs doing the heavy lifting, and modest net growth at many publics. Now the initial National Student Clearinghouse data have been released, they mostly corroborate the early read rather than overturn it. In other words, chalk this up as a premium subscribers read it here first moment.
What NSC adds to our analysis is national coverage around those September–October system signals: broad undergrad gains, community college-led momentum, and a continued grad plateau. That pattern tracks with the signals we compiled - e.g., strength across multiple state systems and record first-year classes at several flagships - and with the outliers we highlighted (Arizona split fortunes: UA down ~3.5% overall and ~20% in new students while ASU up ~8.5% year over year). The net effect isn’t a boom so much as a disciplined, program-mix-driven rebound, especially where institutions leaned into health, engineering, workforce-adjacent credentials, dual enrollment, and retention work.
More Clarity on Gen AI Impact
The early NSC cut shows a genuine rebalancing: computer & information sciences are down 7.7% overall and −15% in grad programs, while student interest is shifting toward programs that feel more insulated from AI displacement - health professions (+6.2% at the bachelor’s level) and engineering (+7.5%). Call it the “don’t compete with the robot, fix the robot’s human” strategy. Higher Ed Dive underscores this story and even notes jumps in engineering technologies (+8.3%) and mechanic/repair (+10.4%) for community colleges. For planning: expect tougher yield and budget pressure in CS/IT grad programs this cycle, with upside in health, engineering, and hands-on technical pathways.
Shift to Skills
The skills shift isn’t a blip, it’s a migration. NSC’s data confirm a multi-year tilt toward skills-first pathways: undergrad certificates +6.6% and associate degrees +3.1%, outpacing bachelor’s (+1.2%). Inside Higher Ed links this to learner demand for faster, cheaper routes to employment and to policy tailwinds (state pushes and OBBBA’s new Pell eligibility for short-term programs). That aligns with what we’ve been tracking since mid-September (and really the past two years): community colleges and workforce-adjacent offerings are doing the heavy lifting, and older-learner re-engagement is rising (ages 25–29 +3.3%, age 30+ +2.7%). The implication for institutions appears to be strategic, not tactical - grow capacity where the jobs are, wire seamless degree pathways and pipeline initiatives, and price/aid these programs with adult learners in mind.
A Note of Caution
I’ll close this section with a note of caution initially shared in October. Due to inflation, dual enrollments, and select free community college programs, increasing enrollment does not equal improving overall institutional finances.
Another ROI Casualty
With Gainful Employment coverage in 2023 and more recently updated with coverage of the new OBBBA institutional accountability, a common theme I’ve been analyzing is that the ROI (and Earnings Premium) mindset has a fundamental flaw.
The policy idea behind ROI is to hold institutions accountable for the economic gains of program completers. A graduate of an undergraduate program should make more than a high school graduate, and those completing graduate programs should have better earnings than undergraduate completers. The problem, however, is that completer earnings are aggregated at a program cohort level (e.g. for the 40 students graduating in 2022 and 2023 combined) but the comparison groups are aggregated at a completely different level (e.g., for an entire state or metropolitan region). This difference blurs demographic distinctions such as different wage levels in different geographic areas, and different wage levels for women and men. See Al Essa’s coverage for additional analysis.
These ROI metrics may be measured three years after completion (Gainful Employment & FVT), four years after (OBBBA), eight years (Carnegie, as we will see), or some other chosen timeframe. The metric may include program and student loan costs or just look at earnings. But the idea is the same.
Today we have a story at Inside Higher Ed that brings to light yet another casualty of this flaw in the ROI mindset - the new Carnegie Classifications for Community Colleges.
Earlier this year, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education came out with a new classification, focused on colleges’ low-income student enrollments and whether their students wind up in well-paying jobs. Released in April, the Student Access and Earnings Classification marks a shift in Carnegie’s approach, years in the making, to assess institutions based on student success. The move was designed in part to acknowledge institutions, such as community colleges, that don’t spend heavily on research or confer doctorates but drive economic opportunity for students.
But not everyone is pleased with the new classification and the way the results shook out. Community college leaders are raising concerns that the methodology isn’t well-suited for their institutions and paints community colleges, particularly in high-cost-of-living areas, in a negative light by labeling some “lower access” or “lower earnings.”
The problem with earnings is the same one - comparing graduate earnings with broadly-based aggregated metrics as a sole measure of the concept.
Earnings refers to whether students who’ve left the college earn competitive wages. To measure that, Carnegie compares students’ median earnings eight years after attending a college to the earnings of working-age people in the same geographic area with a high school diploma or higher.
Community college leaders, first and foremost, take issue with how the classification categorizes colleges as “high earnings” or “low earnings.” Community colleges serve local students, so the classification compares their students’ earnings with median earnings in their metropolitan areas. But four-year institutions draw students from multiple regions, so the classification compares their students’ earnings to a composite of the median earnings from multiple states.
The anecdote shared that brings this home is based in Boston [emphasis added].
For example, the letter from NCSDCC pointed out that students at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts would have to achieve median earnings of $51,301 to avoid a “lower earnings” label. But Harvard University, 12 miles away, needs median earnings of just $39,534 to steer clear of that category because its student population comes from all over the world, most of which has lower median earnings than the Boston area.
It is useful that the Carnegie Classification does not rely on all aggregates coming from state level data, instead adding metropolitan geographic areas at least for community colleges. But the reason I titled one of my posts “The Fundamental Flaw of Earnings Premium” is that the problem of comparing individual earnings (aggregated only within a program cohort) to comparison earnings (aggregate much, much more broadly) is that you will always find these unintended consequences. They cannot be waved away with a tweak here or an edit there.
I do not reject the ROI concept, but I am calling out the flaws in single-metric low-nuance implementations. Expect to see more of these types of stories as the ROI mindset bandwagon rolls on.
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