The higher education community has an unlimited capacity for doomsaying.
To be honest, it’s mostly those who sit outside the schools – people who are reading tea leaves but lack genuine insight into much of anything. Those voices tend to be the loudest. Though, on occasion, their talking points do echo from institutional offices.
For nearly two decades now, those talking points have been apocalyptic and hyperbolic with urgent pleas for how schools have to change. Usually and conveniently, such changes can be made by just buying whatever product someone is selling today.
The easiest example is the multiple predictions that some massive number of colleges would close, driven out of business by disruption or antiquated value propositions. A hypothesis many of those voices said would be inevitably accelerated by Covid-19. Obviously, that has not happened and there are no signs it’s in the offing.
One of today’s sky fallings is the “enrollment crisis” – the idea that schools are being starved for students and that this will be the thing that is finally the death knell for American higher education. It seems that theory, along with the supposed “student debt crisis,” are nearly all we hear about colleges and universities these days.
On enrollment, there is absolutely a shrinking of available college-age people in the United States. That’s math. It’s real. And it’s a trend that is likely to continue, even accelerate in some places, over the next half-dozen years.
But as is always the case, the actual numbers tell a different story. If you actually look, it’s easy to see that over the past decade enrollment squeezes are isolated to specific sectors and not nearly as dramatic or drastic as the doomsayers say.
For one thing, nearly all of the projection-makers on future enrollment have quietly revised their estimates upward. They’re still predicting enrollment declines, just not as deep or steep as they said before.
Jump over and look at this graph from education writer Phil Hill. He has adjusted it to account for some sector and reporting changes. Hill’s graph shows that over the past ten years, overall total college enrollment has dropped from about 20.6 million students in 2012 to an estimated 18.2 million this year. That’s a net loss of about 2.4 million students and it feels like a major dip. It is.
But what you’re likely missing is that nearly all of that drop is community college enrollment or, even more dramatically, among the dark, for-profit colleges. Of the total loss of 2.4 million students, those two sectors alone account for about 2.2 million.
In fact, over ten years, for-profit colleges have lost half their enrollment. That is cataclysmic. And many of them have closed. And while those closures make news, they seem to generate less attention than unrealized hypothetical closures of the future.
For more context, consider the decade-long enrollment figures
of public, four-year colleges which enroll more students than any other education sector. Ten years ago, Hill’s graph shows that 8.1 million students attended public four-years. In 2022, the estimate is for about 8 million – 7,958,000. That’s a net loss of just 100,000 over ten years. It’s not great. But it’s not the end of anything either.
Granted, the big state colleges and universities saw their attendance numbers slowly rise for the first eight years of the past decade, only to see them drop noticeably during Covid, as many students understandably decided that an online college experience was not what they wanted. Still, the net drop is just 100,000, about 1.2%.
That “no thank you” to online college is also probably behind the drop in public, two-year college enrollments, the community colleges. The sector lost 1.5 million students total over the past decade but half of that – 700,000 – came in the two years after Covid-19 arrived.
But the losses aren’t the story. The non-losses should be.
In the private, four-year college sector – the very one most pundits said was most at risk – enrollment is actually up slightly. Yes, up. Ten years ago, 3.929 million students went to private, four-year colleges. Hill’s estimates this year are for these colleges to enroll 3.971 million. More, in other words.
That’s not supposed to happen. We’re in an existential enrollment crisis.
True, a good chunk of the stability is driven by outsized growth in some down-market online schools such as Southern New Hampshire University and Liberty University. And it’s also true that growth there does probably put pressure on some more “traditional” schools. But not as much as you’d think since, with precious few exceptions, nearly every school in every sector offers online options now.
The point is that while the headlines may, the numbers don’t lie. So far, whatever enrollment retreats are happening have been confined to just two segments of higher education and probably won’t spread to the others because public and non-profit private four-year schools remain outstanding value propositions.
Community colleges are too, of course. And their deep enrollment declines are troubling, mostly because they lack the levers to manage their enrollments more directly than most four-year schools do.
Even so, it may not be possible to use the term “crisis” to describe a situation in which the largest sector has seen a dip of less than two percent total over ten years and the third-largest sector has actually grown. But that absolutely won’t stop higher education from using it.
