Where Are the White Students?

For more than a decade, college officials have watched their incoming classes steadily shrink, nudging them closer and closer to an enrollment cliff that experts say campuses could be tumbling off in the next year or two.

Civil-rights advocates, higher-education officials, and politicians have long tussled over how best to boost the college-enrollment rate for students of color and reconcile with the sector’s racist past. With affirmative action now banned and diversity efforts being dismantled, much of the recent national focus has been on how to legally keep the doors open for students from underrepresented minority groups and make sure they have the tools to succeed.

But in a twist that’s caught even some demographers by surprise, it’s the white students colleges have typically relied upon to fill their seats whose numbers are plummeting the fastest.

Over the last decade, undergraduate enrollment of white students has dropped more than that of any other racial group, according to federal data, a Chronicle analysis, and several outside experts. The effects continue to be felt in college classrooms.

Since 2018, enrollment among white undergraduates has dropped by 19 percent across all sectors, compared with 11 percent among Black students. The drop in white enrollment is nearly three times the almost 7-percent decline among college students over all, according to Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The disparity has significantly worsened since the pandemic, as minority enrollment has begun to stabilize while white enrollment continues to slide.

The extent of the shift snuck up on many demographers. “White enrollments were declining even before the pandemic across all sectors,” Shapiro says. “We didn’t really notice it until the last couple of years. When the pandemic started in 2020, we were focused on race and ethnicity and the large declines in Black and Hispanic enrollments,” especially at two-year colleges.

“Over the next couple of years we started noticing, with some surprise, that the declines among white students were equally large as Black declines,” Shapiro adds. The years 2021 and 2022 are “when the declines in white numbers really took off.”

As hundreds of thousands of white students turn away from college degrees, a growing number of colleges across the country face the prospect of empty seats and ballooning deficits.

The result is a dilemma that few seem prepared to tackle: how to change recruitment efforts to attract more white students while also trying to rectify persistent racial inequities for a population that will soon make up the majority of students.

The shift isn’t just the result of demographic trends. Birth rates have been declining, especially among white women. But the enormity of the drop in white enrollment has led researchers to seek other explanations.

The economy has been a major factor as college costs have soared and employers have offered more decent-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. That has fed increasing skepticism about the value of a college degree, particularly among conservatives, who are overwhelmingly white and more likely to be swayed by politicians accusing colleges of indoctrinating students with liberal ideas.

That skepticism is borne out in data from a recent Chronicle survey that found that minority respondents were more than 20 percent more likely than white respondents to say colleges did a good or excellent job educating students.

Drew Hundley, 19, graduated from high school in Waterloo, Iowa, in May and is working as an apprentice for a local electric company. He got a taste of the job during his senior year, when he took an electrical class from Waterloo Career Center in the early morning, then worked from 9 to 3:30 every day alongside a journeyman trainer, wiring apartments and small retail shops.

“A four-year college didn’t seem like my thing,” he says. “I really hate just sitting in class all day.” As a young boy, he helped his grandfather on his farm, and, as a teen, worked with his father on the farm he runs, cleaning and occasionally running farm equipment.

“I got used to working with my hands,” Hundley says. He also felt that a steady paycheck was a better bet than a college loan. “After four years of college, there’s no guarantee you’ll get a job,” he says. “If you go for something really specialized like medicine or engineering, college would make sense, but if you’re just taking random stuff like liberal arts, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth it.”

Viewpoints like Hundley’s have contributed to a decade-long decline in college-going. Between 2012 and 2022, white undergraduate enrollment fell by 22 percent across all sectors of higher ed, from about 9 million to 7 million students, a Chronicle analysis of federal data shows. Black enrollment dropped 19 percent, Asian enrollment was up 2 percent, and Hispanic enrollment surged by 31 percent.

As a percentage of total enrollment, white students dropped from 47 percent in 2018 to 41 percent in 2023, according to data from the Clearinghouse Research Center.

The slides have generally been similar for white men and women, Shapiro says, although that varies by state. That’s made for some surprising comparisons; enrollment among white women, for instance, dropped 21 percent between 2012 and 2022, slightly higher than the 20-percent drop among Black men, according to The Chronicle’s analysis.

The declines have also been reflected across two- and four-year colleges, private and public sectors, and all age groups. The exception is private, for-profit, four-year colleges, where white enrollment rose for the small number of students 30 and older.

Enrollment across all two-year colleges plummeted by 34 percent from 2012 to 2022, with the steepest declines happening during the pandemic, The Chronicle’s analysis shows. Among white students, the decline was 44 percent.

Among students younger than 18 who are taking courses for both high-school and college credit, white enrollment has dropped 6 percent since 2018 even as overall enrollment has surged by 23 percent. Meanwhile, this early on-ramp to college, which researchers have pointed out has been less accessible to students from underrepresented minority groups, saw a 13-percent increase between 2018 and 2023 among Black students, 27 percent among Hispanic students, and 30 percent among Asian students.

In the fall of 2023, there was a slight uptick in overall undergraduate enrollment, but about 80 percent of that came from Black, Hispanic, and Asian students, Shapiro says. No such boost occurred for white undergraduates. Their enrollment was down 2 percent.

Across the country, enrollment declines in recent months have forced some majority-white colleges to lay off employees, shut down departments, and, in a few cases, cease operations altogether. In recent years, sagging enrollment and financial troubles prompted Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education to consolidate six of its campuses into two. Likewise, West Virginia University made sweeping cuts last year to try to stanch its financial bleeding.

White students’ enrollment trends have gone relatively unnoticed at many of the colleges that have faced heightened pressure to focus more intently on racial-justice issues since 2020 — a year that saw protests over police brutality and a pandemic that disproportionately disrupted minority students’ educations. Since then, some Republican lawmakers have accused colleges of giving minority students unfair advantages. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to strike down race-conscious admissions, combined with the nationwide attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, have resulted this year in a rapid dismantling of scholarships, admissions programs, and interventions that many minority students have relied on. The effects of one or more of these factors are being felt at elite colleges like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Black and Latino enrollment has plunged by 36 percent.

The Public-Perception Puzzle

This project examines higher ed’s public-perception problem — and the solutions to it — in our reporting and in an independent national survey conducted by The Chronicle with Langer Research Associates. The survey’s aim is to add depth and nuance to the growing body of research on how people perceive higher ed.

Explore the series.

But for the majority of colleges — which accept at least 75 percent of their applicants, pay little or no attention to race in admissions, and enroll more than half of the nation’s students — the steepest slides have been in white enrollment.

The shifting trend lines seem somewhat counterintuitive, given that white students tend to come from wealthier families who can afford to enroll them in high schools that send more students to college. Compared with the reams of research examining the obstacles many Black and Hispanic students face in obtaining higher education, including bias in the classroom and lack of preparation, little is known about why white students are turning away.

It’s also a sensitive topic to broach at a time when DEI opponents are accusing colleges of ignoring the needs of white students — especially those with conservative viewpoints. Does raising concern over declining white enrollment inadvertently suggest that colleges should shift attention away from minority students? Considering higher ed’s past of excluding those who weren’t white, is it insensitive even to ask why white students are opting out and how to lure them back in?

The questions may be unavoidable.

Angela Otto’s parents never graduated from college, instead preparing for their careers as an electrician and the owner of a metal-detecting business mostly through technology classes and on-the-job training.

Growing up in rural Oconomowoc, Wis., she was surrounded by relatives and neighbors who bypassed four-year colleges, but in her high school, everyone, she says, was expected to aspire to attend one.

When her high-school teacher said she was going to feed her students’ transcripts into a computer program that would spit out for each of them a list of suitable four-year colleges, “I was like, ‘I’m doomed,’” Otto says, thinking of her mediocre grades and subpar ACT scores. When she compared her readout to those of her classmates, who were being matched with prestigious University of Wisconsin campuses, her insecurities deepened. “I wondered, why are they getting these known colleges like Madison and Milwaukee and I was getting Middle of Nowhere Rural Random University? What’s wrong with me?”

Instead, Otto headed to the one local college where she felt reasonably confident of success: Waukesha County Technical College. But that proved a bad fit and, after a few semesters, she dropped out and headed out West in a camper van. She ended up in Bend, Ore., where she found another way to pursue a long-held interest in the environment: with AmeriCorps’ High Desert Conservation Corps.

Trading her laptop for a chainsaw and woodchipper, she’s learned to clear forests of invasive plants, safely haul off dead trees, maintain hiking trails, and restore habitats along the Deschutes River. She earned a basic firefighter certification and created a training manual for the volunteers and workers she now mentors. “I’ve gained so many skills I’d never learn in a classroom,” she says. Plus, she thinks about the money she’s saved.

At the end of her work with the High Desert Conservation Corps, Otto received a $7,000 education award that she can use toward college, but no other purpose. So now she’s back to considering her options. “I’m trying to decide whether to pursue a natural-resources degree,” she says. “Everyone I know has a degree, and to move up the ladder, I might need one.”

Sharing an apartment with her boyfriend, her salary in recent years has been barely enough to get by. A pay raise would definitely be welcome. Still, she says, “My academic track record wasn’t great. I’m not sure if college is the right path for me.”

Like many other people contemplating college, she’s not sure whether it’s worth the soaring expense of a degree and the potential debt she’d take on. Some analysts believe those factors have diminished what researchers refer to as the college wealth premium, which looks at all of a person’s assets and debts. Even though college graduates generally earn higher pay and enjoy better health, a 2019 report by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests that the economic benefits of attending college are shrinking.

Other studies take a more positive view of the outcomes, emphasizing how a college graduate’s lifetime earnings vastly exceed those of a high-school graduate, and that degree holders tend to be healthier and more likely to own homes.

College is a tougher sell when employers are offering up more jobs that pay decent wages but don’t require a college credential. “We’re in the middle of some of the lowest unemployment rates in history. The labor market is hot for lower-skilled jobs,” says Kevin Carey, vice president for education and work at New America, a nonprofit policy group. “I’ve had college presidents telling me they’re competing with the Amazon warehouse out by the highway, where people can make $40-50,000 per year.”

There are more of these jobs in rural than urban areas, and white men are especially likely to earn middle-class wages from them, according to a study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

“White working-class men in particular have been less committed to college for a simple reason,” says Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and founder of the law school’s Equality Action Center. “They could get good, family-sustaining jobs without college.”

That hasn’t always been the case with minority job applicants. “African Americans tend to value education more highly than whites,” she says. “They’ve typically had to be more educated than whites to get the same job.”

Public perceptions about higher education fall across unexpected lines. An opinion survey conducted by The Chronicle in 2023 found that 56 percent of minority respondents said that colleges did an excellent or very good job educating students, while only 31 percent of white respondents believed that. White respondents were twice as likely to say colleges did a “not so good” or poor job. Opinions varied by political lines as well, with conservatives more skeptical about college than liberals or moderates. While 56 percent of Democrats rated colleges as excellent or very good at educating students, only 36 percent of Republicans and a third of independents shared that view.

That’s hardly surprising, given how higher education has become a favorite punching bag among many Republican politicians, especially in states like Florida and Texas. Governors there have accused colleges of making white students feel guilty about their race and quashing free speech for conservatives. Critics have also accused colleges of being inhospitable to students from conservative and working-class backgrounds.

Given the demographic breakdowns of the major political parties, those messages are disproportionately resonating with white families. Among 2022 voters, Republicans were more likely to be white and less likely to be college educated than their Democratic counterparts, according to the Pew Research Center. White people made up 85 percent of Republican voters and 64 percent of Democrats.

Williams, the California law professor who’s the author of a forthcoming book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class, and How to Win Them Back (St. Martin’s Press, May 2025), says many people who are the first in their families to attend college feel out of place and intimidated on a college campus. They also feel unwelcome when people make fun of students from working-class backgrounds or when fraternities hold what they call a “white-trash bash.”

“That culture clash has now been thoroughly politicized,” she says. Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has declared college professors “the enemy” and vowed to aggressively attack higher education. Meanwhile, right-wing pundits like Charlie Kirk deride college as a waste of money and a place where liberal ideas have run amok.

In his 2022 book, The College Scam, Kirk describes students taking on “soul-crushing debt” to take “weird and pointless courses” at campuses “infiltrated by subversive foreign groups” where college-educated professors look down on the working class. Kirk, who founded a network of conservative youth activists called Turning Point USA, reaches a wide audience through radio shows, podcasts, and speaking gigs at colleges.

Among those who took Kirk’s lessons to heart was Morgonn McMichael, who dropped out of Texas Tech University one year before she was hoping to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. McMichael, 25, now works for Turning Point USA, creating social-media content and traveling to high schools and colleges to promote conservative values and warn about what she considers higher education’s “woke” agenda.

As a college sophomore, she says she was nearly kicked out of her sorority for posting pro-Trump messages that the sorority felt were too divisive since she served on its executive board. Meanwhile, she contends, her sisters were freely posting pro-Biden messages.

The following year, she says she was required, during a course on women and gender studies, to write about the benefits of Planned Parenthood, a group she opposes because of her disapproval of abortion. The fact that she even ended up in that course irks her. It was part, she says, of a divisional requirement that focuses on social issues.

For students pursuing fields like engineering, her original plan, college is probably necessary, McMichael says. But she advises students to avoid college if a cheaper, faster alternative makes sense for them.

“There are a lot of intelligent high schoolers who have passion for a craft who lose that in going to a college to get a business major,” she says. A college degree, she adds, doesn’t carry the weight it once did, and “kids who graduate from college with thousands of dollars in debt and no jobs go on and get their master’s and Ph.D.s and become lifelong students.”

The pain of shifting enrollment patterns isn’t being felt equally. In a handful of states, including Alaska, Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, and Washington, white enrollment fell by more than a third between 2012 and 2022, outpacing declines in other racial groups, the Chronicle analysis found. In New Mexico, overall enrollment plunged by 29 percent for all groups, but 46 percent among white students.

In Utah, enrollment patterns have caught many by surprise. Between 2005 and 2024, the number of white men enrolled across the state’s degree-granting institutions climbed 7 percent but has remained flat since 2017, according to the Utah System of Higher Education. Unlike the national picture, where enrollment patterns among white men and women have been similar, in Utah, they’ve diverged. The number of white women enrolled in public higher education across the state jumped 25 percent between 2005 and 2024.

“White men are dragging our numbers down significantly, and we need to figure out why,” says Utah’s higher-education commissioner, Geoffrey Landward. Many of those who are opting out live in rural Utah, where the state has begun offering more financial aid to keep students coming.

“We have a pretty red-hot economy in Utah, with a lot of jobs in areas like construction that traditionally have been more dominated by males,” he says. Many women who lost jobs during the pandemic may have realized the needed to bolster their academic credentials by going to college, he suggests, while men may have felt more pressure to stay in the work force when money was tight.

Meanwhile, Utah colleges are enrolling more students of color, with the number of Hispanic men nearly tripling between 2005 and 2024 and up 11 percent since 2020, the state’s higher-education system reports. “I’m encouraged to see enrollment growth in populations who often faced barriers to higher education,” he says. It’s unclear how much of that growth might be related to DEI efforts that are now being eliminated.

Utah is one of 28 states where anti-DEI laws have been introduced since 2023, according to The Chronicle’s DEI Legislation Tracker. Fourteen of the 86 bills introduced have been signed into law. In Utah, a law that took effect on July 1 bans offices and programs that promote differential treatment based on a person’s race, sex, color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, or gender identity.

“Without fully understanding why we are seeing that increase, I grow concerned about making drastic changes to programs that were targeted to those populations for fear of undoing that progress,” Landward says.

Across all sectors, colleges that are losing disproportionate numbers of white students will have to adjust. That will require countering the narrative that there are easier, cheaper ways to get the skills that employers want. For colleges in demographically diverse regions, there’s less urgency about shoring up enrollment among white students because students of color can fill at least part of the gap.

However, “if you don’t have a large minority population, you have to understand those families and communities that are not sending kids to college and figure out how to make college meaningful for them,” says Peace Bransberger, director of programs and evidence for the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE).

A 2020 report by the commission highlights the headwinds that will be buffeting colleges in the coming years. It found that the number of high-school graduates is expected to peak in the next few years before starting a modest decline through at least 2037, and fewer of those students will be white.

The number of non-Hispanic white students graduating from public high schools has been shrinking since 2008, and that pattern is expected to continue for at least another decade, the WICHE report found. Comparing the high-school graduating class of 2019 with projections for the class of 2036, the commission predicts the numbers will tumble by 19 percent for white students and 8 percent for Black students. Meanwhile, the number of Hispanic graduates is expected to increase by 9 percent, and Asian students by 24 percent.

When white families who have always been counted on to send their kids to college lose interest, “Do I just give up? Do I only try to recruit out of state where everyone else is trying to recruit?” Bransberger asks. Instead, she suggests, “Look in your backyard and dig deep on what your mission is for serving a community.” Whether it’s packaging programs differently or offering degrees that can be earned faster, “the implications are obvious. You have to do something different.”

The University of Northern Iowa, faced with years of declining enrollments from in-state students, launched new degrees in jobs-focused fields including applied engineering and materials science. The University of Iowa is among at least 32 colleges that are banding together to expand recruiting and support for rural and small-town students, with free campus visits, internships, and extra math preparation.

Tennessee officials are also creating more incentives for students to pursue four-year degrees, even if they start out in technical fields. Students who complete a farming-operations technology program through the Tennessee College of Applied Technology at Crump can receive up to 30 hours of credit toward a bachelor’s degree in agriculture at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Students can start on the farming program as early as ninth grade.

Looking ahead, highly selective colleges will still be able to dip deeper into their applicant pools and their endowment funds to fill their seats. Less selective colleges and regional universities are more likely to shrink.

Private, nonprofit colleges could also take a big hit, says Carey, of New America. He has warned about the “sudden and precipitous decline” colleges will soon face “due to a rolling demographic aftershock” of the Great Recession. “They are most predominantly in the part of the country that are losing populations and where populations are particularly white.”

Coaxing back students who’ve turned away from college will be key to many institutions’ survival in the years ahead. An important part of that — even as colleges work to recruit and retain more students of color — will be paying attention to a demographic they hadn’t expected to have to worry about.