Growing Number of Americans Are Skipping College: Report

Students at a graduation ceremony for the IBM-inspired P-TECH school in New York City, on June 2, 2016. Jon Simon/Feature Photo Service for IBM

A growing number of Americans are opting to skip college in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report.

Nationwide, transfer enrollment from two-year colleges to four-year institutions, or undergraduate college enrollment, dropped nearly 8 percent in the fall of 2022 compared to 2020, according to data from the educational nonprofit, National Student Clearinghouse (NSC).

Those declines continued even after the return to in-person classes that were put on hold during the peak of the pandemic, albeit at a slower pace than the previous year, according to the report.

Referred to by NSC as “upward transfers,” undergraduate college enrollment accounted for the “majority of fall 2022’s transfer enrollment losses and deteriorated during the pandemic for students at all income levels,” the report found.

The report covers 11.5 million undergraduate students without a prior bachelor’s degree that were enrolled in fall 2022 in a three-year fixed panel of institutions (fall 2020 to 2022), which represents approximately 89 percent of the Clearinghouse universe of institutions.

In order to establish a pre-pandemic baseline for the new analysis, NSC employed an expanded five-year fixed panel of institutions (fall 2018 to fall 2022), representing 11 million undergraduates without a prior bachelor’s degree and 83.8 percent of the Clearinghouse universe of institutions.

Specifically, the report found that upward transfers declined by approximately 7.5 percent, or 37,600 students, in the fall 2022 semester from fall 2021 and marked double-digit declines of 14.5 percent, or 78,500 students since fall 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

One of the steepest year-over-year declines from fall 2021 occurred among students transferring to highly selective institutions, with a 13.4 percent drop representing 6,200 students, the report found.

Reverse Transfers on the Rise

Transfer enrollments overall have fallen by nearly since the fall of 2020, the report stated.

However, compared to 2020, the number of “reverse transfers”—in which students transferred from a four-year institution to any two-year institution —and “lateral transfers” between institutions of the same type began to rise in 2022, according to the report.

Lateral transfers between four-year institutions increased by 2 percent, while lateral moves between two-year colleges rose by 0.3 percent, the report found. Meanwhile, reverse transfers were up by 1 percent.

“Unlike the stabilization that we saw in the general enrollment numbers last month, the number of students who transferred in fall 2022 is continuing the downward slide it has been on since the pandemic began in 2020, and this is especially true for upward transfers,” said Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

“It is very encouraging, however, that among those who transferred from community colleges into four-year schools six years ago, students are now completing bachelor’s degrees at higher rates than before, despite the disruptions of the pandemic.”

The report authors noted that the findings highlight the pandemic’s “severe impact on transfer enrollment trends.”

However, additional factors such as the rising college tuition fees, and soaring inflation appear to have added to the trend.

‘Dangerous Proposition’ for Strength of Economy

“Only about half the jobs in the U.S. require a college degree, and the supply of college graduates far outnumbers the opportunities for jobs that require the degree,” Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University told The Washington Post. “Combine a steep extra cost with a marginal or no benefit, and it is hardly a surprise that significant numbers of community college graduates are deciding not to pursue the additional degree.”

Elsewhere, experts are warning that the decline in college graduates could further exacerbate ongoing labor shortages across various industries including healthcare and information technology.

“It’s quite a dangerous proposition for the strength of our national economy,” Zack Mabel, a Georgetown researcher, told the Associated Press.

The latest report comes after the Biden administration announced in November 2022 that it would extend its moratorium on student loan repayments, interest, and collections through June 30, 2023, marking the eighth extension.

That extension was rolled out as the U.S. Supreme Court reviews multiple lawsuits bought against Biden’s student loan debt relief program announced in August last year.

Under the program, up to $10,000 in student loan debt for individuals making less than $125,000 or households with less than $250,000 in income would be canceled, while as much as $20,000 for eligible borrowers who were also Pell Grant recipients would be wiped out.

The Supreme Court is expected to make a ruling on the matter by June.