First-year enrollment for college students dropped precipitously over fall 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, a national survey found.
First-year college enrollment dropped by 16.1%, a major reduction when compared to fall 2019, which saw only a 0.4% decrease in enrollment, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found in a report released Thursday. Overall undergraduate enrollment at colleges saw a 4% drop, while graduate enrollment increased this fall by 2.7%.
Schools across the country have been forced to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic, and different institutions have taken varied tacks. Some colleges have opted to go fully virtual, others have allowed students to return to campus with restrictions, and some have blended the two into a hybrid mix of online and in-person classes.
Public community college enrollment was hit particularly hard by the pandemic. First-year enrollment at such schools plummeted 22.7%, and overall community college populations shrank by 9.4%.
Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, told the Wall Street Journal that the economic effects of the pandemic have had a more profound impact on students who were planning to enroll in two-year community colleges and then decided they couldn’t because of finances.
“I fear that many of those students will never get back,” he said.
The data for fall 2020 was derived from some 9.2 million students from more than half of the schools that report data to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
