For the first time in more than a decade, undergraduate enrolment in colleges and universities in the United States has grown, says a new report by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC). The 1.2% growth translates into 176,000 more students in America’s higher education institutions.
While public and private non-profit four-year institutions saw enrolment increases of 0.6% or gains of 38,000 and 16,000, respectively, the greatest increase was in public two-year community colleges, which registered a 2.6% gain or 118,000 students.
Almost 17,000 of these students attend colleges that award two-year academic degrees and, in some cases, award four-year bachelor degrees, and another 20,000 attend community colleges that act as feeder schools into four-year institutions.
Doug Shapiro, NSCRC’s executive director, cautioned that while colleges are hoping that this increase signals the end of the decline that dates back before the COVID-19 pandemic to the recession of 2012, the reality is that enrolment remains in a deep hole.
“The small uptick this fall is a welcome change for higher education, but there are still over a million empty seats on campuses today that were filled five years ago,” he said. In percentage terms, the decline since 2019 is 5.5%.
Decreasing freshman numbers
The Current Term Enrolment Estimates (CTEE, 2024) report shows that growth in enrolment did not come from freshmen; their numbers increased by only 18,000 out of the 15.2 million college and university students on the nation’s campuses.
In contrast to last year’s freshman increase of 7.4% in private for-profit colleges, these colleges actually saw a 1.2% decrease in the number of freshmen.
Public four-year universities turned in their worst performance in three years: their freshman class rising by only 1% after gains of 4.2% and 1.3% in the previous two years. Private non-profit four-year colleges saw a much lower increase of 0.2%, 1.6 percentage points lower than the year before and 4.1 percentage points lower than in 2021.
“Almost all of the growth,” said Shapiro, “is not from new freshmen but, rather, from returning students who are continuing from last year and also returning stop outs,” that is, students who have returned to their studies after at least one year away.
The age cohort of the freshman did see significant changes. The traditional age group, 20 or younger, saw no growth, after having grown by 4.3% the year before. The 21 to 24 age group grew at a healthy 6%, though this figure is 3.9 percentage points lower than the year before. The 25-year-old or older group grew at essentially the same rate as it did in 2022, 6.5%.
(Because the 20-year-old or younger cohort is so much larger than the other two, the fact that the traditional aged group saw no growth explains why, overall, freshmen do not account for the increase in undergraduates.)
The number of graduate students, which declined by 0.9% in 2022, rose by 0.6%. In 2022, there were 3.085,883 graduate students in the United States; this past fall there were 3.102,873. The largest increase was registered by private for-profit four-year institutions, which saw an increase of 1.7%. The sectors to which America’s most famous research universities belong, public four-year (for example, University of Michigan) and private non-profit four-year (for example, Stanford University) saw 0.8% and 0.1% growth year-over-year from 2022.
These changes left the number of graduate students in each sector essentially unchanged from the previous three years: 1.5 million students in the public four-year sector, 1.3 million in the private non-profit four-year sector, and 0.2 million in the for-profit sector.
Refusal to identify race
One of the biggest surprises in NSCRC’s data is the increase in the number of freshmen who refused to check the box indicating their race. The number rose by 35% to approximately 140,000.
Though Shapiro could not be sure, he suggested that last June’s US Supreme Court decision that overturned affirmative action could have something to do with this increase.
“For non-freshman undergraduates, who entered [college] before that decision,” he speculated, “it’s unlikely that they would have retracted a previous indication of their race or ethnicity.”
Among students who reported their race or ethnicity, NSCRC found that only self-identified Asian Americans grew, by 3.5%. The percent of Hispanics was the same as the previous year while whites were down 2% and blacks were down 4%.
Major gains for Hispanics
The complications raised by respondents not indicating their race or ethnicity notwithstanding, NSCRC’s dashboard provides rich detail about race, enrolment and economic status.
At both public four-year and private non-profit four-year colleges, the students who belong to the highest income quintile and identify as white continued to decline – by 20,500 from last year’s figure of 797,062, which itself was 20,000 fewer students than in 2021.
The number of students from this quintile has declined every year since 2018, when it stood at 930,094. The number of white students in the second highest quintile declined by almost 15,000 from 2022 and the figure has been on a downward slope from 671,284 since 2018.
Over the past five years, the number of white students attending college or university who come from the middle quintile has fallen from 443,099 to 391,795 in 2022. This figure is 5,000 lower than in 2021. The drop in the lower middle quintile between 2021 and 2022 was under 3,000 and for the lowest quintile, the number of white students rose from 138,863 to 139,910.
Black students in the upper quintile have also declined, by about 1,000 since last year and 8,000 since 2018. Those in the next quintile declined by 16,000 over five years and almost 3,000 since last year. The middle quintile declined by 1,000 since last year while the lower middle quintile rose by 2,000 to 76,811.
Hispanics have made major gains. The number of students from the highest quintile rose from 141,868 five years ago to 155,558 last year, almost 5,000 students higher than 2022. The second highest quintile tracked the highest, with 153,886 now enrolled in college or university. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of students from the middle quintile rose more than 6,000, to 135,346. There were more students from the lowest two quintiles as well.
Amongst Asians, the four lower quintiles showed little movement over the past four years; their numbers for 2023 were 83,778; 43,867; 25,536 and 17,837. The highest quintile, however, has risen from 160,209 to 194,576, with last year’s increase being nearly 9,000 students.
The trend for women’s enrolment reversed the 0.9% decline recorded in 2022 and rose by 0.3% in 2023. Accordingly, there were 8.336,338 million women enrolled in America’s colleges and universities. Men’s enrolment rose, by 1.1% bringing their numbers to 6.128,109 million.
Regional pattern
With the exception of the Northeast, every region of the country saw gains in their student bodies. However, even though the Northeast saw a 0.4% decline – and New York, by far the largest state in the region, saw a 0.7% decline – Massachusetts saw a 3.8% increase.
The Midwest saw a 0.7% increase of students, with Kansas experiencing the greatest increase, 2.9%. Illinois gained 2.5%, which brought its number of students to 483,321 while Minnesota gained 2%. Not all states in the region gained: Wisconsin, Iowa and Missouri all lost students, 1.7%, 1.1% and 0.5%, respectively.
Every state in the South, save for Tennessee and Louisiana, grew. Kentucky gained 4% while Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama all gained about 3.5%. The state that gained the most in its region, the West, and the country, was Montana, which added 7.1%. California counted 3.1% more students than it did a year earlier. By contrast, two neighbouring states, Oregon and Nevada, each saw declines of 1.2% and 2.1%, respectively.
Decline in humanities enrolments
The CTEE report is grim reading for humanities professors and administrators at four-year institutions. While there was anaemic growth, 0.1%, in courses grouped together under the rubric liberal arts and sciences and general studies and humanities, more focused programmes continued to decline. English language and literature majors, for example, fell another 3.3%, which is more than twice the rate recorded in 2022. Since 2019, the number of English majors has fallen by 22%.
Journalism programmes tell a similar story. Last year’s decline of 1.1% followed years of declines of 2.9%, 8%, 3% and 1.3%. Social sciences fared no better, falling 2.3% last year; the cumulative decline in these fields since 2019 is 13%. The number of education majors fell by 1.2%, following a cumulative drop of 9% since 2019.
After four years of declining enrolment, totalling 8.3%, engineering majors rose by 2.6%. Health professions and related clinical sciences continued to decline, by 0.9%, after four years of having declined by 8%. (At community colleges, however, these majors grew 6.4%, after four years of declines that totalled just under 33%.)
Biological and biomedical sciences grew for the first time in three years, by 0.8%, which means that since 2021, these fields have fallen by 2.2%.
“Computer and information sciences continue to lead the pack with a 9.5% increase in four-year schools and a 9% increase at community colleges as well,” Shapiro told the podcast before explaining that this edition of CTEE disaggregates these majors into subgroups.
Accordingly, he continued, you can see that computer information sciences and computer science are driving the gains in four-year institutions. The former rose 5.9% and now accounts for 233,222 students while the latter rose 8.5% and has 221,516 students.
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