The Decline in College Enrollments Is Serious—But Not Being Taken Seriously

A student walks near Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles, Calif, on April 23, 2012. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Commentary

Higher education is facing a crisis that nobody wants to talk about. According to data collected by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment nationwide dropped from just over 20.5 million students to 17.3 million in the 10-year period from fall 2011 to fall 2021. That’s a drop of 15.8 percent.

Why is this happening? A number of factors are involved, certainly including both an aging population and COVID-19, but the most important of them is the public’s growing skepticism about academia. We need to disentangle these different factors.

First of all, the overall decline in student numbers actually understates the problem of declining college attendance, because it includes both undergraduate and graduate/professional numbers. Graduate/professional enrollments have been steadily increasing at an average annual rate of about 1.2 percent, which means that the decline in undergraduate enrollments is even greater than the decline in higher education overall.

Given a fixed total enrollment number, every thousand more graduate/professional students means a thousand fewer undergraduates. But it’s the decline in undergraduates that should really concern us, because that figure tells us how many fewer people are now opting for a college education. The drop in undergraduate enrollments between 2011 and 2021 is about 3.6 million students, or 20 percent of the total. Where there were five undergraduates in 2011, there are only four in 2021.

How do demographic changes affect this picture? The college-age (18–24) share of a slowly aging population has been shrinking for some time, but the general increase in the nation’s population kept that cohort’s numbers rising anyway until 2013–2014, when they peaked at about 31.5 million. At that point, the absolute numbers of college-age people (not just their share of the total population) began to decline. From that time to the present, they have dropped by an average of 0.6 percent per year. For the 10-year period we are looking at (2011–2021) the average drop in the numbers of college-age people has been about 0.4 percent per year.

If we adjust the decrease in undergraduate enrollments for smaller numbers of potential undergraduates in the population, the annual decline reduces to 1.6 percent. This means that in 2021, there were about 3 million undergraduates less than there were in 2011 due specifically to the choice made by parents and students not to opt for a college education. And that is the measure of public disenchantment with higher education.

But what about COVID-19? It’s true that the undergraduate enrollment shortfall for these past two (COVID-involved) years combined was 6.6 percent, while that of the previous two (both pre-COVID) years had been 3.8 percent. COVID-19 probably accounts for some of the increase, but we can’t be sure how much, because the more recent years also featured increasingly negative stories about higher education in the national press. And even if we do assume that COVID-19 caused some part of the decrease in enrollments from 2019 to 2021, it isn’t clear how and why.

Was this simply due to a dislike of remote learning? Or was it that parents were looking over their children’s shoulders and seeing for themselves how radical college professors now are? We don’t know. But whatever role COVID-19 played, it’s at best only a small increase in two of the 10 years.

Will the losses continue? There is no reason to believe that a relentless year-by-year decline over a full decade will suddenly stop. Why should it, when the main factor involved—public disenchantment with academia—appears to be increasing. But we must also remember that it’s the full extent of the decline in undergraduate numbers, including what is due to an aging population, that will determine how overbuilt American higher education becomes, and how likely it is that individual campuses will begin to fail for want of enrollment. Because the demographic factor appears to be increasing, too: Jill Barshay in the Hechinger Report reports research indicating that college-age numbers will decline by 15 percent in the four years after 2025.

The figures I’ve cited are all public knowledge. If university administrators don’t know about them they should, and at least some surely do. But there are no signs anywhere of a course correction. To put the matter bluntly: A serious public reaction is underway against the badly politicized college campuses and the dumbed-down education that often results, but colleges and universities show no signs of reining in their radical social justice warrior professors. This means that the enrollment shortfalls will likely get worse, and that the reckoning, when it finally comes, as it must, will be all the more painful.

Part of the reason that these enrollment trends are being ignored is that the shortfalls don’t yet threaten the more prestigious institutions. Those can simply dig deeper into their large applicant pools. The losses are therefore disproportionately impacting the less prominent end of the spectrum.

For example, two-year colleges experienced an enrollment loss from 6.9 million to 4.66 million during the 2011–2021 decade, almost a third, which is significantly more than the average for all institutions. But this partial cushioning effect can’t go on forever.

Community colleges don’t just provide the first two years of an undergraduate education—they also have a stable core clientele of their own in vocational education. At some point, their enrollments will stabilize and the declines higher up the food chain will accelerate. When that happens some four-year colleges will begin to fold.

The urgent question raised by all of this is, how much lower will public respect for higher education have to go before decision-makers—whether in colleges or state legislatures—are forced to face and deal with academia’s corruption by radical politics?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.