'Losing A Generation': Fall College Enrollment Plummets For 1st-Year Students

Applying to College
1

“…Students attending college for the first time represent one of the largest groups missing from college classes this fall, Shapiro says. For students who graduated from high school in the class of 2020, the number of graduates enrolling in college is down by 21.7% compared with last year, based on preliminary data. For graduates at high-poverty high schools there was a 32.6% decline in attending college, compared with a 16.4% decline for graduates of low-poverty schools.” …

1 Like
2

Seems like there has been a downtrend over the last several years that may be accounting for much of the decline, although the COVID-19 situation could certainly have added to the decline (there is graph to that effect in the linked page).

Perhaps it is not surprising that lower SES students whose families are more likely to be under greater financial stress than before are more likely not to attend college, even though both lower and higher SES students include some who choose not to attend or defer college due to distance learning issues for them. Both COVID-19 and the associated economic effects have been more harmful to lower SES people than higher SES people on average.

3

I wonder how much of this has to do with students opting for a gap year. My son was supposed to attend Harvard but saw the writing on the wall - no in-person classes. doing school remotely on line and opted to apply for a gap year back in April. He and 346 of his classmates are not in school this year. That’s almost a quarter of the admitted class. They will all be going in the fall. So I think an awful lot of students decided after the spring fiasco of zoom classes in their schools that this was NOT the kind of higher education they wanted. Since there was an option to defer, why not?

1 Like
4

I was wondering the exact same thing as @Jennibc. If I or a child had graduated from high school in 2020, I would have been inclined to look very hard at taking a gap year.

I do understand that the number of high school graduates has been slowly trending down for a while. However, I would be inclined to wait to see next year’s stats before assuming that the significant downturn this year is anything more than a one year blip.

1 Like