College Board analysis is latest to find that community colleges suffered more than four-year colleges, but report also suggests that four-year colleges saw a loss of students with higher grades. And some states saw gains in enrollment at four-year colleges.
Who showed up last fall? That’s the question the College Board attempted to answer with a new report on enrollment — new and continuing — of students.
The College Board used its own data and those of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center to create a sample of nearly 10 million students who represent about 80 percent of all U.S. high school graduates in the last three years. The students attended more than 22,000 U.S. high schools and 2,800 U.S. colleges, resulting in a nationally representative data set for understanding the impact of COVID-19 on college enrollment and retention among recent high school graduates. (The report does not include adult students.)
Some of the results confirm past reports on the coronavirus. “Student enrollment rates declined more substantially at two-year colleges than four-year colleges. The largest shifts in student enrollment rates occurred within the two-year sector, where regression-adjusted enrollment rates declined by nearly 12 percent because of the pandemic, and stand in stark contrast to the smaller 4.5 percent and 2.8 percent enrollment rate declines in the private and public four-year sectors, respectively,” said the College Board report.