Community College Enrollments Drop This Fall – Inside Higher Ed
Community colleges are seeing a bleak enrollment picture and undergraduate enrollments are down largely across the board, but not by as much as some had feared.
Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Although the enrollment declines were steepest at community colleges, undergraduate enrollment fell at all types of colleges, including private nonprofit four-year colleges (-3.8 percent) and private for-profit four-year colleges (-1.9 percent). The decline was more modest at public four-year colleges (-0.4 percent), although there were differences across public four-year institutions according to location, with rural institutions seeing the biggest decline (-4 percent) and urban institutions seeing slight gains (+0.5 percent).
The first glimpse of fall enrollment data during the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recession shows that undergraduate enrollment fell for students of all ethnicities. There were sizable declines in international enrollments at both the undergraduate (-11.2 percent) and graduate (-5 percent) levels (though it is worth noting that the clearinghouse’s data are not as complete for international students as they are for other student groups).
Total graduate enrollment increased by 3.9 percent.