5% decline in first-year students reverses years of gains

First-year enrolment in American colleges and universities declined by 5% – and 6% in four-year BA institutions – between 2023 and 2024. This decline, the largest since the 3.6% decline in 2021, the last year of the COVID-19 pandemic, reverses three years of gains, including last year’s increase of 3.9% of 18-year-old first-year students, says a report published this week.*

The decline was manifest across the country, with only four of America’s 50 states, Delaware, Alabama, Louisiana and Washington DC, registering gains (an average of 3%) and Oklahoma registering no change, according to the report by the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), an advocacy organisation devoted to increasing equity and excellence in postsecondary degree access, especially for first-generation students.

The largest declines occurred in Wyoming and Nebraska colleges and universities, which, respectively, enrolled 20.3% and 17% fewer students than in 2023. Eleven states saw double-digit declines in the number of first-years on campus, including Nevada (14.1%), South Dakota (16.4%), Iowa (13.3%) and Mississippi (12.2%).

Kim Cook, chief executive officer of NCAN, was blunt in her assessment of the findings.

“This semester’s enrolment numbers for high school graduates should be frightening for practitioners, policy-makers and the public alike. Our progress towards increasing college enrolment coming out of the pandemic has been stymied, and we will have to work much harder to help many of these students to rediscover college pathways in the future,” she said in NCAN’s corporate blog post.

Doug Shapiro, vice-president of research and executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which supplied the data used by NCAN – which analysed about 1.4 million 18-year-old first years in almost 80% of America’s postsecondary institutions – told University World News in an email: “This year’s 5% decline in new high school grads entering college, the largest since the pandemic, is particularly troubling for four-year college students (down over 6%).”

Declines across the board

Declines occurred across most sectors, as well as income, gender and racial groups.

Highly selective colleges and universities, the category to which Stanford and Harvard universities belong, as well as America’s famed small liberal arts colleges like Smith and Wesleyan, saw a 3.4% decline, while the number of first-year students in institutions in the very competitive category fell by more than twice that amount: -8.7%.

The percentage of White first-years in the two most competitive categories dropped 5% and 12%, respectively, while they dropped 11.3% in the next lowest category: competitive schools.

Black students fared even worse in the highly selective category, dropping by 16.9%, though their decline in the selective category was somewhat less than that of Whites: 5.6% (vs. 8.7%).

In the highly selective category, Hispanic first-years declined by 7.9% and 6.3% in the competitive category.

Surprisingly, given that the 2024 first-year class was the first full intake after the United States Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in a case that argued it was discriminatory against Asian Americans, the number of Asian American first-years also declined in the highly selective category by 10.3% and 11.6% in the very competitive category.

The decline of male and female students was equal at 6.1%.

Nor did neighbourhood income make much difference, save for the bottom quintile which saw a decline of only 1.6%.

From the four upper quintiles, colleges and universities enrolled between 5.7% (in the upper two quintiles) and 5.2% (in the fourth quintile) fewer first-years in fall 2024 than a year earlier, which saw healthy gains of between 2.6% in the second quintile and 6.2% in the lower middle quintile.

Financial aid recipients

Among the study’s most important findings is the drop in the number of students at institutions notable for the high number of their students who receive Pell Grants, the US federal government’s grant to the poorest of the nation’s students.

The percentage decline in public four-year colleges that are considered high Pell-serving, which would include many of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and regional state universities, was -6.2%, while it was -6.5% for moderate Pell-serving and two-tenths of a percent lower (-6.7%) for low Pell-serving institutions such as flagship state universities.

Among private non-profit four-year colleges that are high Pell-serving, this year’s first-year intake was -10.1%, a more than 13 percentage point drop from last year when the number of students grew by 3.3% compared with 2022. Low Pell-serving institutions in this category experienced a first-year decline of 5.8%.

The declines in public two-year institutions (which offer students courses that allow them to transfer into the third year of a state university programme) and Public PAB [Planning Accreditation Board] institutions (junior colleges that offer four-year BAs) were significantly less.

High Pell-serving public two-year and PAB institutions enrolled only 0.9% fewer students this year than in 2023, while the figures for Moderate Pell-serving and Low Pell-serving were -1.5% and -2.7%, respectively.

The declines in first-year enrolment in Pell-serving institutions concern Shapiro, Mike T Nietzel, former president of Missouri State University and a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine on higher education, and Bill DeBaun, NCAN’s senior director of data and strategic initiatives.

According to Nietzel, the high proportion of declines at Pell-serving institutions is most likely a manifestation of the botched rollout last year of the federal application and federal student aid (FAFSA) online portal.

Through most of the 2024 college application season, the system was plagued by delays, glitches and malfunctions. While in previous years, FAFSA’s online system was available starting 1 October, last year it wasn’t available until 30 December. There followed a 161-day delay before applications began to be processed. Of the 5.4 million calls to the FAFSA hotline by applicants seeking help, 74% went unanswered.

According to the website of the General Accounting Office, these and other issues “led to a 9% decline in submitted FAFSA applications among first-time applicants and an overall decline of about 432,000 applications as of the end of August (2024)”.

Although most students apply for student aid through the FAFSA portal, its failure to function properly impacted low-income students more than other students, explained Nietzel.

“Most students are looking for some financial aid. But, if I’m a student in an upper-income family, I don’t have to fill out the FAFSA. If I do and it’s bungled, I may not complete it, but I would still go ahead with my applications to schools.

“So, it makes sense that there would be a differential effect based on the financial neediness of the applicants,” said Nietzel.

In an email to University World News, DeBaun wrote: “Students from low-income backgrounds, many of whom are first-generation students, were likely disproportionately impacted by the FAFSA rollout because these students and families often need additional support to navigate the process.

“Beyond that, impacts on the award letter timeline also hurt these students disproportionately because financial aid is critical for these students’ ability to pay for college.

“If an award letter came after decision deadlines, for example, students may have made the difficult decision not to matriculate this semester. If students from low-income backgrounds, who are often Pell Grant recipients, were disproportionately affected, the institutions to which they tend to matriculate were too.”

He also suggested that “if we had had a normal FAFSA year last year, we would not be staring at a 5% decline in 18-year-old enrolment this semester”.

Shapiro told University World News that the decline in first-year students enrolling in Pell-serving institutions “serves as a strong caution about the importance of financial aid for enabling access to bachelor’s degrees for all students who seek them”.

‘Demographic cliff’

The decline in first-year enrolment in the North East and Upper Midwest are alarming – especially because these regions have not returned to their pre-pandemic numbers and these states are expected to bear the brunt of the “demographic cliff”, the steep decline in the number of high school graduates 18 years after the 2008 financial crisis.

Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, Illinois and Ohio experienced declines of between 12.2% and 10%. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Connecticut and Wisconsin, saw declines of between 7.8% and 4.3%.

“The demographic cliff is expected,” Nietzel said, “to hit nationwide in 2025/26, so this decline actually is preceding the cliff. It’s occurring at a time when the number of high school seniors is still increasing, if slightly.

“If I were a college leader, I would find that to be very alarming, that this heralds a decline, even before we get to the population issue of declining numbers of high school seniors.”

DeBaun told University World News that the situation would “likely cause a ripple through many campuses’ finances that extends beyond this academic year”.

He added: “It’s why we are encouraging states and systems to identify ‘on-ramps’ to postsecondary education that can reach students who did not make a postsecondary transition immediately following high school graduation.”

Scepticism about higher education

In addition to the FAFSA impact on Pell-eligible students, DeBaun and Nietzel pointed to other downward pressures on enrolment. “Students may be lured into the workforce given the strong economy and high starting wages,” wrote DeBaun.

Nietzel cited another factor, which has been covered in these pages recently: growing scepticism about higher education

“Another important factor,” he said, “is the increasing public doubts about our colleges and universities, and the necessity of having a degree.”

Shapiro’s email ended by sounding a note of caution about the educational future of the high school class of 2024, noting that there is little reason to expect that students who did not become first-years at the usual time will later enrol in college or university.

“If the enrolment rates of 2020 grads are any guide, the odds are very low that the missing freshmen will restart their college plans in the coming years. This could become the second great loss to the education and skills of the nation’s future workforce,” he said.

* The National Student Clearinghouse announced on 13 January 2025 that a methodological error led to a miscalculation of fresher enrolment in its preliminary report and subsequent research has established that, rather than declining, first-year student enrolment actually increased in the fall. An updated report on enrolment from the NSC is to be released on 23 January. Look out for an update from University World News.