Undergraduate enrollment is still down across higher education, according to the latest National Student Clearinghouse report. Black and Hispanic enrollment in community colleges is still down more than white and Asian enrollment.
For-profit colleges are still doing well with undergraduate enrollment, relative to other sectors, though it has decreased since the last report. The sector was up about 3 percent and now is down by 0.1 percent.
Some are concerned by the relative stability at for-profit institutions. Historically, these colleges pour money into marketing to and recruiting students, said Robert Shireman, director of higher education excellence and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.
“That could be the beginning of some of the same kind of problems that we saw a dozen years ago,” he said, referring to the influx of students, many coming from vulnerable populations, to for-profit colleges in the wake of the Great Recession.
Higher education over all is not seeing any enrollment boosts like it has in past economic downturns, Shireman said, likely because people are hoping to wait out the pandemic and return to their jobs.
But he’s still worried that the tides could turn, even though several bad actors have closed their doors.
“If you look back 15 to 20 years, people were saying that the bad for-profits were gone, so we shouldn’t be concerned about growth at the for-profit level. Those for profits they were talking about were Corinthian, ITT Tech, the University of Phoenix. Those are exactly the institutions that grew too quickly,” he said. “We’ve been dealing with the consequences ever since. The history and the incentives indicate that the for-profits that we have right now are in danger of becoming more predatory, and it can happen very quickly.”