White students are falling out of higher education more quickly than any other racial group, and recent data suggests that middle- and upper-income white students are skipping college at a higher rate than their lower-income peers. That flies in the face of entrenched narratives about more-affluent white students following a well-marked path to college. Experts can only speculate about why it might be happening.
Data released in October by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center indicate that fewer white undergraduates from more affluent neighborhoods have enrolled in college over the past six years. This is happening as white students from lower-income neighborhoods enroll at slightly higher rates, and as Black and Hispanic undergraduate enrollment across the income spectrum has increased.
Colleges and advocates have spent years pushing to get more students of color into higher education, and the data reflect some progress. But there is also a mystery here. A common narrative is that a strong economy, and growing mistrust of colleges among conservatives, has encouraged more young white people — especially men from rural areas — to skip college and enter the work force. That’s not what the data show. The enrollment declines are coming from the country’s more affluent neighborhoods, and the more affluent the neighborhoods, the steeper the decline, on average.
For some experts, the National Student Clearinghouse data on white-student enrollment, when pointed out, came as a surprise. For others, it comported with other recent data points they’ve noticed. While no obvious theories to explain the phenomenon surfaced, some caveats and a few hypotheses did, including ongoing demographic shifts, the recent FAFSA troubles, and pervasive public concern about the cost and value of a college degree.
If more affluent white students continue to skip college, it could have financial ramifications for the sector. Wealthier students typically pay more to attend college than their lower-income peers, though costs are rising faster for the latter group. A smaller freshman class can have an immediate impact on an institution’s bottom line — a dip in revenues that persists for years at a time when many colleges can hardly afford one.
The enrollment drops are not big percentages, but they’re part of a large and mostly unheralded shift in who goes to college. White undergraduate enrollment has fallen by more than 2 million students since 2012, according to a Chronicle analysis, while Black enrollment has fallen by about 600,000 students and Hispanic enrollment has risen by nearly 700,000 over the same period. While undergraduate enrollment in the fall of 2024 is up 3 percent from last year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse data, freshman enrollment is down 5 percent and white freshman enrollment is down 11 percent.
There are reasons to proceed with caution when drawing conclusions from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data, said Hee Sun Kim, a senior research associate at the center. The data released in October are preliminary, representing only about half of the participating colleges, she added, and the income quintiles are calculated by median household incomes for neighborhoods, not actual family incomes. But the findings are odd, she said: “I would love to have answers for that.”
FAFSA Woes?
The number of non-Hispanic white students has been shrinking since 2008, according to a 2020 report by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, and it is expected to continue to decline through 2036.
In 2015, more than 71 percent of white high-school graduates ages 16 to 24 attended college, according to U.S. Census data. It’s now 60 percent.
Students now graduating from high school have also lived through years of disruption, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the recent FAFSA debacle. But students of all races have passed through the same gauntlet — why would those hurdles snag wealthy white students?
One possible explanation is that more-affluent white students aren’t being urged to attend college with the same fervor as their lower-income peers. Most programs designed to encourage high-school students to apply for financial aid and enroll in college are aimed at students from lower-income communities, said Bill DeBaun, a senior director at the National College Attainment Network, a nonprofit advocacy group. “But middle-income families, many of whom are white, also can benefit from things like FAFSA-completion support or postsecondary advising,” he said, “even if they probably, on average, have a higher baseline level of college knowledge.”
Interventions to encourage FAFSA completion among lower-income students have borne fruit. According to an analysis of federal financial-aid data by DeBaun and Peter Granville, a fellow at the Century Foundation, a policy group, the percentage of high-school students from the lowest-income quintile who completed a FAFSA in 2023 — nearly 53 percent — exceeds that of the second and third income quintiles. Households in communities of color are also now, for the first time, more likely to fill out a FAFSA than not.
But the most affluent high-school students are not completing FAFSAs at the rate they once did. According to an analysis of federal financial-aid and Census data by Granville and DeBaun, as of May, the percentage of students from the highest-income quintile who filled out FAFSAs for the fall of 2024 (51.5) still had not equaled the percentage of students from the bottom-income quintile who filled out FAFSAs the year before (54.3).
FAFSA completion is not only a key step toward college, its financial tea leaves can determine which college might work for a student, or whether college makes sense at all. “If your family is middle income, you really depend on the FAFSA to know what you’ll need to pay,” Granville said. “Especially with a delayed or glitchy FAFSA, it takes substantial college knowledge to predict what your net price is likely going to be. It can be harder to navigate if you’re middle class and also first generation.” That could explain why some middle-income white students are skipping freshman year. It doesn’t get at what could be going on with their more well-heeled peers.
‘Completely Relentless’
Financial aid aside, money may be behind the drop in white undergraduates. College is expensive by almost any definition, and public narratives about student-loan debt have exploded. “If you talk to folks, affordability is going to remain the number-one thing people talk about as a barrier, regardless of income,” said Jinann Bitar, senior director of research at EdTrust, a policy group. “That’s important, because perception can be just as critical to a student not enrolling as reality.”
White students and their families, however, may be less likely to have a positive perception of colleges and the value of a college degree. In a recent Chronicle survey, 56 percent of people of color said colleges were doing an excellent or very good job of educating students. Just 31 percent of white respondents said so. Still, gaps in retention and graduation rates between white students and students of color persist at institutions across the country. In the most recent federal data for students seeking bachelor’s degrees, the six-year graduation rate was 58 percent for white students, 41 percent for Hispanic students, and 33 percent for Black students.
But there are other ways to make a living than by going to college, and students are aware of them. Public skepticism about college is “completely relentless,” said Tanya I. Garcia, vice president at the Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit advocacy group, and the strong economy provides an attractive alternative: “If you’re getting a job out of high school that is a pathway into the middle class, why would you go to college?”
Perhaps the decline of more affluent white students owes to perceptions of universities as hotbeds of radical ideologies and humanist fripperies. Perhaps it’s just that some students have other options — gap years or starting their own businesses. While students from lower-income backgrounds often see college as their only path out of poverty, “these middle- to upper-class students probably don’t see themselves falling into poverty based on these decisions” not to attend, Bitar said. “The motivations are different if you perhaps come from a background where you have seen successful entrepreneurship, and you may have other resources that aren’t liquid assets but are networks or access to places, like to host meetings or events.”
