Colleges and universities across the U.S. saw major enrollment declines among first-year, 18-year-old freshmen in fall 2024, according to recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Overall freshman enrollment declined by 5%, while the biggest drop among school types — more than 6% — was at public and private nonprofit four-year institutions. Private colleges that serve a high number of Pell Grant recipients — students who demonstrate greater financial need — saw an average decline of more than 10%, per Clearinghouse data.
“Unfortunately, given what we know about the connection between FAFSA completion and enrollment, it’s not surprising,” says Bill DeBaun, senior director of data and strategic initiatives at the National College Attainment Network.
“But it’s still discouraging, devastating, disappointing. There’s a lot of 18-year-old freshmen included in that 5% year-over-year decline who could have been successfully starting a postsecondary pathway this semester. And now it’s going to take a lot more work and effort to reengage them and convince them to get back on a college-going pathway.”
This enrollment decline shouldn’t deter students from attending college. There could be some benefits, including more available spots in a college’s upcoming class, some experts predict.
Potential Reasons for the Enrollment Decline
While it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact cause or causes, many experts believe the troubled 2024-2025 “Better FAFSA” rollout contributed to the freshman enrollment decline.
“Five percent is actually pretty steep among freshmen, but I think an argument can still be made that it could have been worse given the fears around the very concerning FAFSA completion rates all the way to late in the cycle,” says Daniel Hurley, CEO of the Michigan Association of State Universities.
As of November 22, 54% of the high school class of 2024 completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — a nearly 9% decline from the prior year, according to NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker.
“Students were not able to access the aid that they needed to attend college in any kind of acceptable time frame,” says Shannon Vasconcelos, senior director of college finance at Bright Horizons College Coach, a college admissions consulting firm. “I think we lost a lot of students somewhere along the line in that process. They got frustrated. Eventually they gave up.”
That could have led to students considering lower-cost options, like community colleges, she says. Declines were lower at two-year institutions: freshman enrollment at public community colleges in fall 2024 decreased by just 1.7%, per Clearinghouse data.
[See: Don’t Make These 8 Freshman Mistakes in College.]
The current economy — which has many job openings and lower unemployment rates — may be another factor, experts say.
“When you have a strong labor market, there are a portion of high school seniors that when they graduate, they’re going to head off to the employment marketplace and skip postsecondary on a temporary basis or something longer,” Hurley says.
There’s a broader move toward nonconsumption, which means high school graduates are not choosing college, says Carla Hickman, vice president of research at EAB, an education research, technology and advisory firm.
“We have been sounding that alarm bell with our partners for years now,” she says. “Everyone was so worried about demographic decline in the United States — as they should be, just fewer students to go around. But the number of students who just don’t think college is a viable option, do not see the benefits near-term to either a two-year or four-year program, I think that we are starting to see that play out in the numbers.”
It’s also been more than a year since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions — which some experts attribute to part of the decline.
Enrollment rate declines were the highest among students of color at highly selective four-year private and public colleges. Black and Asian student enrollment at those schools decreased by about 17% and 10%, respectively, while white and Hispanic student enrollment dropped by 5% and nearly 8%, respectively, according to Clearinghouse data.
How Colleges Can Address Concerns About Value
With rising tuition, the cost of college continues to be a concern for many families.
Less than half of American adults — 47% — said they believe a four-year college degree is worth the cost, but only if it doesn’t require taking out loans, according to 2024 survey data from the Pew Research Center. That declined to 22% who said it’s worth the expense even if someone has to borrow.
Only 25% of respondents said it’s extremely or very important to have a college degree in order to get a well-paying job today, and 35% said it’s somewhat important, per Pew data. Nearly half said it’s less important to hold a four-year degree today compared to 20 years ago, while 32% said it’s more important now.
“I don’t think that we as a country are doing a good enough job of talking about how significant earning a college degree can be for driving social mobility,” says Annie Reznik, chief of staff at the Partnership for Education Advancement, a nonprofit that supports historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions.
“I think sometimes it’s actually a little bit of a privilege to think that you don’t need college to sort of hit the financial positioning that you are aiming to for yourself or your family in the future,” she adds.
[Read: A Guide to Different Types of College Degrees.]
Colleges have a role to play, including making it easier to complete the application process and being more transparent about the actual cost of attendance, experts say. The sticker price — the amount advertised as the full rate for tuition and fees before financial aid is factored in — often frightens families.
“That sticker price is just turning off, frankly, the majority of folks out there,” Vasconcelos says. “They see the sticker price of college and they say, ‘There’s no way that I could afford that.’ And the fact is that they don’t have to for the most part, but they don’t know that.”
Colleges need to better promote the payback of a degree, she says.
Workers with a bachelor’s degree earned median weekly wages of $1,493 in 2023, compared to $1,058 for associate degree-holders and $992 for those with some college but no degree, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median weekly earnings for those with no more than a high school diploma was $899.
“I think some community colleges are maybe doing this a bit better in showing that direct connection to the workforce with some of these short-term certificate programs and shorter-term associate degrees, where they draw a very clear connection to the job market that sometimes the four-year schools do not,” Vasconcelos says.
Hickman says higher education needs to see it “a little bit as a moment of reckoning and ask themselves, ‘Is what we’re offering actually the right educational experience that students need?’ Schools have been flexing around with reducing a couple of credit hours here and there. I think we may need something far more radical if we’re going to reach some of these students who are looking for things that are shorter, faster, more career-aligned.”
[READ: How Parents Can Support the Adjustment to College]
How the Current Admission Cycle May Be Affected
For students who are already hesitant about college, seeing the declines could create more doubt and questions, Reznik says.
However, it’s important to “understand that this data is not fully baked or fully conclusive,” she says. These significant declines didn’t occur everywhere.
For instance, enrollment was down for freshmen by just 1% at public colleges in Michigan, which Hurley credits to a statewide emphasis on FAFSA completion and the Michigan Achievement Scholarship, a program in its second year that provides eligible students up to $5,500 per year for up to five years to attend one of the state’s 15 public universities.
DeBaun says overall national enrollment data shouldn’t affect students and their families “and their consideration of whether to complete the FAFSA and whether to matriculate to a postsecondary institution. The people that it should affect are policymakers, practitioners, institutions (and) systems that serve students because this data put in cold light what the stakes are here. We need more students pursuing postsecondary pathways and we need our systems, FAFSA and otherwise, to support them in that pursuit.”
Experts advise students to broaden their college search and not just focus on highly selective schools.
“There is a breadth of opportunity out there and I think the emphasis on highly selective and highly resourced institutions can sometimes create a perception that there isn’t a space for a student at a college or university,” Reznik says.
Colleges with lower enrollment numbers last year — who rely heavily on tuition revenue — may experience financial challenges. However, from the college applicant perspective, it could now be easier to get into some schools as they attempt to fill seats, Vasconcelos says.
“Maybe they accept more students this year,” she says. “Maybe they are more generous with some institutional financial aid to try and recruit more students. That could be a bright side for students applying this year, that colleges have more of a vested interest in working harder to recruit students.”
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Why College Freshman Enrollment Declined and What it Could Mean for Students originally appeared on usnews.com
