At the onset of the pandemic, some higher-education analysts feared a second catastrophe: widespread college closure. Drawing on work done before the pandemic, Robert Zemsky, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, estimated that 20 percent of institutions would find themselves facing potentially existential risks.
Last week’s report of enrollment data in the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s Current-Term Enrollment Estimates for the fall of 2021 would appear to align with dire predictions for higher education: Compared with the fall of 2019, enrollments are down 938,000. While last academic year’s losses were concentrated in the for-profit and public two-year sectors, the Clearinghouse reports meaningful contraction in all subsectors in 2021. Cue the previously predicted visions of mass closure.
And yet, only a dozen or so institutions have announced plans to close their doors since April 2020. Assisted by generous government aid and faster-than-expected vaccine development, the path taken by higher education seems more about serial adaptation than widespread closure. Still, the enrollment estimates from the Clearinghouse (along with its Stay Informed reports from last fall) point to worrisome attendance patterns that will demand continued transformation if higher education is to continue to disprove predictions of demise.
The Online University
Since Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring’s The Innovative University (2011), higher-education watchers have anticipated an era of transformation that would rewrite educational practices resulting in hundreds if not thousands of shuttered colleges. With the pandemic initially forcing students into distance learning, the stage seemed set for revolutionary change.
Work-from-home trends in the labor market speak to the potential for digital realignment. Gallup reports that even as vaccinations and warmer weather led case rates to plummet this past summer, the share of employees working remotely at least part of the time never fell below 40 percent. Perhaps more relevant for the future college graduates who are current college students, two-thirds of white-collar employees worked at least partially at home, and 40 percent did so exclusively. Having tasted greater locational flexibility, nine in 10 remote workers told Gallup they would prefer to continue the practice after the pandemic.
However much the outside world may be changing, higher ed is only undergoing a muted progression toward this new digital world. According to National Student Clearinghouse estimates, after a 3-percent rise last year, fall-2021 enrollments at primarily online institutions saw a major reversal, resulting in enrollments 6 percent lower than prepandemic levels. Despite the impression one might get from widespread media campaigns, online institutions like Southern New Hampshire University and the University of Phoenix are not absorbing the entire market for college students.
Primarily online institutions may still demonstrate leadership in a key dimension: enrolling younger male students. While primarily-online-institution enrollments of women in all age groups were lower in 2021 than in 2019, those of men ages 18 to 24 increased — and enrollments of those under age 20 are up a healthy 13 percent. Still, given the gender distribution and total number of students attending these institutions, even if the attendance changes of this youngest group of students were applied to the entire primarily-online-institution-attending population, they would result in an increase of fewer than 30,000 attendees — hardly what one would expect if creative destruction was remaking the landscape of higher education.
Of course, none of this precludes the broader (if less disruptive) application of new technologies. Recent research by economists at Arizona State University and the University of Michigan, for instance, suggests that we should expect continued expansion of online course-taking among on-campus students. They find that ASU students’ willingness to pay for on-campus social activities is about twice that of their willingness to pay for in-person classes. In other words, the in-person learning community matters more than in-person classes, at least at Arizona State.
Even at institutions where courses are taught in “traditional” settings, the technological experience during the pandemic can’t be ignored. The tools used for distance learning will support virtual guest lectures, asynchronous student support, and more. And outside the classroom, many institutions are adopting remote-work policies — both because remote work makes sense for some positions and because staff members increasingly value flexibility offered by other employers. Such technological adaptations are important even if they represent more evolutionary than revolutionary change.
Selective Institutions Stay on Top
As foreshadowed in Common App data from this past spring, the Clearinghouse report suggests that the pandemic amplified the benefits of being a selective institution. While institutions at all levels of selectivity experienced enrollment setbacks in 2020, a fall-2021 enrollment rebound at “highly selective” institutions more than erased those losses resulting in a net gain of 2 percent. “Very competitive” colleges mostly held their own, losing just 1.7 percent over the past two years. During the same time period, however, “competitive” and “less selective” institutions saw two-year enrollment losses of 5.5 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively.
The National Student Clearinghouse’s deep dive into first-year enrollments shows that losses disproportionately affected college entrance, as opposed to persistence. For example, over the past two years, first-year enrollments at competitive and less-selective colleges fell 13.4 percent and 10.1 percent, respectively. The pandemic was apparently more likely to delay college entrance than the disruption of existing enrollments. After a national decline in first-time enrollments of nearly 10 percent, many will be disappointed by the lack of rebound in the fall of 2021: For the public and nonprofit sectors, last week’s report showed little to no change from the year before.
Several temporary, pandemic-related forces most likely explain the relative enrollment success of more-selective institutions. First, disruption in traditional college-search practices very likely benefited more-established “brands.” Unable to visit many campuses in person, prospective students made application and matriculation choices without the benefit of much of the personalized information available to past applicants. Limited information probably nudged students toward flagships and other institutions that students know (or think they know).
Second, cancellation of SAT and ACT tests, coupled with concerns about equitable access to tests once reinstated, led approximately 1,000 colleges — including many of the most selective — to join the ranks of the test-optional. While students face a modest cost of submitting scores to all institutions, in the case of a selective institution, a student may choose to withhold an application rather than submit a low score. With the barrier of test scores removed, it is not surprising that applications for fall-2021 admission to more-selective institutions increased. While conceived as a response to the pandemic, resulting test-optional policies seem to have worked much like broader access initiatives, generating greater interest and enrollment as seen in the Clearinghouse report.
Should we expect expanded demand for selective colleges to continue beyond Covid? Pandemic-induced enrollment patterns look much like the anticipated effects of ongoing demographic change. In particular, a rising share of parents with college degrees suggests rising interest in selective four-year institutions given past college-going patterns. As a result, we might expect the interest in selective institutions to remain high for reasons unconnected to the pandemic.
But should we expect the pandemic experience to magnify that trend? Probably not. Even today, amid the Omicron surge, we see a return to traditional patterns of college search. The campus visit is back, albeit with masks. Prospective students once again have the opportunity to learn through in-person experience about the potential fit of a previously less-known institution.
On the other hand, last month’s announcement that Harvard will remain test-optional through 2026 suggests that this pandemic-inspired adaption may already be the new status quo among more-selective institutions, boosting their applicant pools. Regardless, it seems implausible that this or any other pandemic circumstance will alter long-term enrollments at highly selective institutions. Test-optionality might increase application counts, but, by definition, highly selective colleges reject many more students than they accept. Were they inclined to raise enrollments by 5 percent, they simply would do so — test or no test. Strategic considerations, not temporary pandemic circumstance, drive such decisions.
Differences by Demographic Subgroups
The Clearing house’s disaggregation of enrollment data by gender and race/ethnicity offer two reasons for concern. In 2020, sharp declines in enrollment among men initiated discussions of the long-established trend toward gender imbalance. After reaching gender parity in 1979, the share of postsecondary students who were women exceeded 57 percent in 2019 — a trend that was further amplified by the pandemic. According to the recent Clearinghouse reports, losses to male enrollments seen in 2020 persisted into 2021, affecting men in every race/ethnicity subgroup. Because enrollment losses were larger among men than women at public and nonprofit four-year institutions, these institutions experienced a continuation of the longstanding gender tilt.
Labor-market conditions often influence enrollments. Unprecedented job openings and high starting wages might partially explain lower college enrollments this fall. While that may be so, it does not explain the observed differences by gender. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that between March 2020 and September 2021, the employment losses among women and men ages 20 to 24 differed by less than 100,000 — a difference far smaller than those seen in enrollments. Apparently, colleges have also lost men to nonemployment.
Regarding race and ethnicity, a first reading of Clearinghouse analysis of enrollments during the pandemic suggests that Native Americans were most affected, down 15 percent. Enrollments by Black and white students fell 12 percent, while Latinx and Asian enrollments declined 7 percent and 6 percent, respectively. This reading, however, ignores prior growth trends. Relative to growth rates heading into the pandemic (reported last year by the Clearinghouse), enrollment patterns changed most among Latinx and Native American students and least among whites.
Perhaps disproportionate losses seen among male, Latinx, and Native American students represent temporary setbacks caused by short-run pandemic realities. For example, some researchers cite the hands-on, experiential nature of many two-year college curricula as an explanation for the particularly large losses of male enrollments at these institutions. The economists Diane Schanzenbach and Sarah Turner find that declining enrollments in two-year programs teaching assembly, repair, and maintenance explain nearly all of the gender difference in community-college enrollments. Alternatively, perhaps the curtailment of co-curricular campus experiences has fallen more heavily on some student groups than others. These explanations suggest potential for enrollment rebounds once the pandemic fades. We can hope.
But perhaps we should do more than hope. A quick glance back to enrollment patterns following the Great Recession cautions that temporary disturbances can produce lasting effects. In the five years leading up to the recession, U.S. Department of Education data show that college attendance rates among Black high-school graduates rapidly closed in on the national average. In 2010, the gap in the three-year average stood at only 2.6 percentage points. In the fallout of the recession, it was perhaps unsurprising when some of those gains were lost. After all, Black households experienced larger economic fallout during the recession. But matriculation rates did not recover along with the economy. Instead, a near decade-long skid reopened a 10-point college-attendance gap in 2019.
At this point, while it is too soon to know whether enrollment setbacks experienced by male, Latinx, and Native American students are temporary, it is not too soon to devise plans to avoid new trends that could mar the next decade. And it is well past time to tackle the re-emerging gap experienced by Black high-school graduates.
History Rhymes
Even though the pandemic had an extraordinary effect on how we lived our lives these past two years, we should not be entirely surprised if it does not rewrite the future. Experience with past calamities teaches us that people are resilient and prone to revert to accustomed behaviors.
Consider the 1918 flu. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that virus infected one-third of the earth’s population, killing approximately 10 percent of those it afflicted. Certainly, the 1918 flu was a foe as consequential as the virus we face, and it motivated many of the same public-health efforts witnessed today. Still, most of us had to learn anew the concept of social distancing, because, as much as the flu dominated activities in 1918 and 1919, when the threat had passed, behaviors largely reverted to earlier patterns.
Even as headlines remind us that the present pandemic is not over, evidence of regression toward the mean is visible. Students learn in classrooms and share campus sidewalks with prospective students. Recent evidence from the Common App offers hope that the enrollment rebound that didn’t materialize this fall may come as soon as next year. Through mid-December, unique applicants to returning Common App members rose by 13 percent from the same period in 2019-20. (However, applications for federal aid have been flat year over year, which raises questions of whether the early Common App data will be representative of applications as a whole.) What’s more, growth in first-gen applicants was particularly strong — up 23 percent, year over year. Underrepresented-minority application numbers also rose about twice as fast as other applications. These results are consistent with disproportionate growth in federal aid applications seen in low-income and high-minority communities. While we are still early in the 2021-22 admissions cycle, this data provides hope that worrisome demographic patterns may reverse.
In time, perhaps we will see the pandemic as a blip in the trajectory of higher education. Perhaps its effects, while transitory, only speed our path toward inevitable ends, such as deeper use of technology and holistic admissions practices, leaving the long-term future unchanged. If so, and the pandemic does not rewrite the future of higher education — if it requires only repeated and fundamental revision of nearly every campus practice to respond to a countless series of temporary crises, that will have been challenge enough.
