Higher ed enrollment suffered massive decline for the spring 2021 academic term, falling by 3.5% – 603,000 students, according to a new report by The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC).
This decline stands a staggering seven times larger than last year’s decline – Spring 2020 saw a 0.5% decrease and Spring 2019 saw a 1.7% decrease.
The report, “Current Term Enrollment Estimates Spring 2021,” shows that the spring 2021 enrollment decline was due to undergraduate enrollment numbers – which fell by 4.9%, 727,120 students – while graduate enrollment actually increased 4.6% – 124,115 students.
Fall 2020 higher ed enrollment saw a 2.5% decline.
“So the overall message is that we found from this latest enrollment data, number 1: we are discovering very similar patterns we have been reporting for the whole time, since the pandemic started,” said Dr. Mikyung Ryu, director of research publications at NSCRC. “Undergraduate enrollments are particularly affected by the pandemic-related disruptions, whereas graduate enrollment has been increasing steadily from the start and up until now. So there is quite a divergence between undergraduate-level [and] graduate-level enrollment. And this is a very consistent pattern we’ve been seeing from the start of COVID-19 last fall.”
Public two-year colleges experienced the worst of it by a vast margin, with a 9.5% decrease in enrollment – 475,997 students fewer – meaning 65% of the undergrad decline was from public two-year schools. Following in second, with a 1.5% decrease, are private for-profit four-year colleges.
“The community colleges sector remain the worst-hit sector of entire post-secondary education during the pandemic,” said Ryu. “And whereas public four-year institutions are quite the opposite, they have shown slight enrollment decline but that is not any more notable than what they were prior to the pandemic.”
