Disappearing White Students

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In this episode

When it comes to college enrollment, admissions officers and civil-rights advocates often talk about historically underrepresented groups, including Black and Latino students. But white-student enrollment has dropped 19 percent since 2018 — more than any other racial group. People in higher education often seem reluctant to talk about it.

Related Reading:

• Where are the White Students? (The Chronicle)
• Affluent White Students are Skipping College, and No One Knows Why (The Chronicle)

Guest:

• Daarel Burnette II, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Katherine Mangan, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but it may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Katie Mangan Were there some white students who were hearing that message that colleges just weren’t welcoming to white students and that it was actually impacting their decisions whether or not to go to college?

Jack Stripling Over the past couple of years, many of the biggest stories in higher education have centered on race. In 2023, a U.S. Supreme Court decision, striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, sent shockwaves throughout the country. Under President Donald Trump, the war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in higher ed and beyond has kicked into overdrive. What all this will mean for students of color is a topic of preoccupation and concern among higher ed officials and civil-rights advocates. But there’s another, quieter story playing out on college campuses that no one seemed to see coming. White students are opting out of college at rates higher than any other demographic group. It’s a somewhat counterintuitive fact that is puzzling to researchers, journalists, and colleges. And it’s adding new complexities to a larger conversation about where the country is headed.

Today on the show, we’ll talk to two of my colleagues at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Katie Mangan and Daarel Burnette, about what may be driving this white enrollment trend. Katie is a senior writer at The Chronicle, and Daarel was the lead editor on her recent article about this issue. Katie, Daarel, thanks for joining me today.

Daarel Burnette Glad to be here.

Katie Mangan Great to be here, Jack.

Jack Stripling Good to have you both. We’ve talked on this show before about students who are opting out of college for various reasons. But I was a little surprised to hear that this seems to be particularly true of white students. Daarel, how did your team get onto this story?

Daarel Burnette Yeah, so we knew, post-pandemic that the enrollment decline was just very dramatic across the board and was causing all sorts of headaches for colleges as to how to get these kids come back to college. So when we were brainstorming how to write about this, I did what most Black journalists do, which is, you know, we should really write about Black folks, because I know just anecdotally that typically when the country gets a cold, Black folks get a fever. So we decided to write a story about Black enrollment. But as we were going through the data, the numbers just didn’t jive. Over time, we started getting more clues that there was something unusual happening when it comes to demographics, race and enrollment. One of the stories we did was about a trustee at a college in Minnesota in which he said at a board meeting, there’s just too much diversity on this college campus. And that got him into a lot of trouble. There was a lot of hysteria. People wanted him to resign, etc. But one of our data reporters looked into it. And sure enough, not only was the white enrollment declining at a faster rate than the Black and Latino enrollment there was, but she just also discovered that this was having detrimental effects on the overall enrollment because the drop was so significant.

Jack Stripling So it’s an inflammatory statement, but actually the data shows there’s something to it. That actually there are fewer white students at this college.

Daarel Burnette Yeah, exactly. And that’s kind of stuck in the back of my head because it was like, this guy is saying something that’s really controversial, but he also might be, there might be a little bit of truth to what he’s saying. So there was another story that a reporter was doing on why some flagships were, why their enrollment was dropping at such a dramatic rate and why they were having to do these huge budget cuts. So as he was doing the story, one of the sources just said passively, well, these white kids just are not going to college. And the source didn’t really have a lot of context as to why that was or didn’t really understand why it was. But he just said it so confidently. I just knew that there might be something there. So we asked one of our data reporters, Brian O’Leary, to look into this and what he discovered was just really shocking.

Jack Stripling Well, I want to get to that. And I want to turn to Katie, but just to kind of sum this up. A lot of what you’re talking about is what we as reporters do, which is we just start hearing things and sometimes we’re hearing things that are counterintuitive, which might turn on your Spidey senses a little bit. And in this case, that happened. So Brian pulls together some data and Katie, who does some on the ground reporting on this, starts looking into it. Katie, what did the data that was gathered show about declines in white enrollment?

Katie Mangan Well, what the data showed, which I found really surprising, was that since 2018, enrollment among white students has dropped by 19% across all sectors. And this is public private, two year, four year, selective, not so selective. It’s all kinds of of institutions. But the drop in white enrollment was nearly three times the overall drop in enrollment for undergraduate institutions, which was a little closer to 7%. So that was just really surprising.

Jack Stripling So, can you put those figures into some perspective? How many students are we talking about?

Katie Mangan It’s significant. If you look even further back to 2012, we’re talking about a decline of more than two million white undergraduates across the country.

Jack Stripling Wow, so what did the data tell us about other populations? What about Black and Hispanic students?

Katie Mangan We saw declines in Black students, but not at the same levels we’re seeing with white students. Between 2018 and 2023, Black undergraduate enrollment declined by 11%. Hispanic undergraduate enrollment actually grew a little bit. It’s up 2%. So what we’re seeing with white students really stands out.

Jack Stripling That’s really interesting. Is this happening at all sorts of colleges?

Katie Mangan I think it’s happening across all colleges, and there’s certainly some exceptions. Some highly selective colleges have been able to dig deeper into their applicant pools. Their enrollment numbers might not necessarily show this, but that’s a very small slice of the pie. And this trend is generally happening across the board to all different kinds of institutions.

Jack Stripling So, Daarel, you mentioned that it seemed counterintuitive that the population that might be most affected by these enrollment declines was white students. That often, the instinct of journalists is to look at underrepresented populations that have historically had trouble accessing higher education. Were you at all concerned about what it would mean to write a story about the crisis of white enrollment or however you want to put it?

Daarel Burnette There is both a disincentive and an incentive to write about this. So the disincentive being that this is a talking point that could be used to inflame hysteria over how colleges are recruiting and retaining students of color. So this debate is very fraught and there are a lot of myths, codified language, stereotypes. There is just a lot of confusion over what is and is not happening on college campuses. And then I think the incentive is that I’m just so curious as to what is driving the hysteria around DEI, and once you understand what’s happening when it comes to enrollment, once you understand what’s happening on college campuses, etc., it gets us closer to that truth. It gets us closer to why there’s just so much anxiety over how colleges are going about recruiting and retaining students.

Jack Stripling Daarel, I want to drill down into a point you made. We’ve seen so much opposition to DEI in this country over the past couple of years. As you know, a lot of states have passed laws banning DEI programs. Donald Trump has effectively waged war on DEI during his second term. So are you saying that the decline in white students on college campuses may be, even subconsciously, driving some of that DEI opposition?

Daarel Burnette Yeah, like it’s I think I might have said this earlier on, but like there is a truism in Black history that typically whenever there’s this huge backlash in the white community, there is something unusual happening in their community that they’re looking for a scapegoat. It’s one thing to say, Oh, there are a handful of people who think DEI has gone too far. But it was in several states. And when these laws were passed, it was passed by a large majority of the legislature. So it’s clear that the general populace really does have anxiety about their relationship with their local college.

Jack Stripling And two things can be true at once, right? White enrollment can be falling, but Black students can still be underrepresented in college. Is that right?

Katie Mangan When you look at college enrollment for 18 to 22-year-olds, there’s still a larger percentage of the white population going to college than you see in some other groups. About 41 % of white people in that age range are enrolled in college, compared to 36 % of Black people and 33 % of Hispanics. And that’s just part of the story. Black and Hispanic students continue to have lower college graduation rates than white or Asian-American students.

Jack Stripling So Katie, once you had this data showing white enrollment declines, how did you begin reporting on it?

Katie Mangan Well, Daarel and I first of all, we talked about, again, how people might interpret the data and, of course, how we should interpret it. What does it mean that fewer white students are going to college and what are some of the reasons behind it? And again, you know, a lot of our concern was we didn’t want to play into that narrative that critics of college diversity efforts had created, that minority students were being given all kinds of unfair advantages in college admission and that colleges were no longer welcoming to white students. But at the same time, I was wondering whether maybe there was some kernel of truth to at least some of that. Like, were there some white students who were hearing that message that colleges just weren’t welcoming to white students, and that it was actually impacting their decisions whether or not to go to college. So Daarel and I talked about how important it was to really find some of those students from a variety of backgrounds and talk to them about what motivated their decisions. And it’s not easy to find, you know, students who aren’t going to college, so that was a reporting challenge. But one of the first things I did was just to reach out, sort of see what data, what reports there were out there. And I was kind of surprised to see that very little had been written about this issue of declining white enrollment. I was kind of surprised by that, you know, given the fact that we are seeing that these enrollment declines go way back like well over a decade among white students. There was very little research being done. But the person that I always turn to for enrollment data and I turned to at this point was Doug Shapiro from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, because he compiles, very frequently, like at least four times a year he keeps journalists and public up to date on enrollment trends. And I said, you know, Doug, we’re finding this really strange finding. We’ve crunched some data or our data data analyst has crunched some data. And we’re seeing these disproportionate declines, really surprising declines among white students. And, yeah. How come we haven’t seen this or have you noticed this? And almost immediately Doug got back to me and said, well, yeah, I mean, we’re noticing this too. And frankly, it surprised us too.

Jack Stripling So, Katie, as you look at these numbers and you start talking to people, do you start to get any sense as to why this white enrollment drop is happening?

Katie Mangan That was one of the real challenges. There just really hadn’t been much research or any research really that I could come across that pinpointed the reasons for the decline in white student enrollment. There’s so much research about the barriers that students of color faced, and yet there was so little that I could grab on to that would give even a hint of why white students were turning away. There have been theories and there’s a lot of guesses as to why that might be. And I’m happy to go into some of those because I did, sort of, was able to piece together some possible explanations based on my conversations with the researchers who I talked to and the students who had decided not to go to college.

Jack Stripling So, we don’t have great research on why white enrollment might be dropping. Where did you look for answers about it?

Katie Mangan What I did was I started calling around to parts of the country where I figured there would probably be more likely to be facing these problems. Rural areas, parts of New England. I was thinking like, where are colleges that rely most heavily on white students to fill their seats? Colleges that maybe never really thought that they had to sort of question whether they were going to be able to attract enough white students. And I made a bunch of calls and I didn’t hear much back at all. I mean, people didn’t return my calls. Or if they did, they didn’t want to talk about it. And it seemed obvious that either they hadn’t really looked into the reasons for a decline in white enrollment or it was something that was just kind of sensitive to talk about. Again, as Daarel mentioned in this, in the context of everything that was going on around the country about what was the impact of all of these diversity efforts, were white students getting the short end of the stick? Were they being unfairly treated? In that context, it was just a tough topic to bring up. Like, why should we care? Okay. Enrollment among white students is down. Is that something that we really need to focus on now? And I think the concern, too, was if we do focus on this now, does that mean we’re going to be taking focus away from the very real challenges colleges face in continuing to enroll and retain students of color as though, you know, is this going to become an either or sort of thing? Like now we’ve discovered that there’s a problem with sliding enrollment among white students. So we need to shift our focus there instead. That was, you know, something, I think some people were concerned that that was the message that might go out.

Jack Stripling So you have experts that have seen this but haven’t made a big show of it. You’re not seeing a lot of research papers out there about this. And some admissions officers are declining to return your calls. You don’t necessarily know that that means this is a potentially explosive issue to talk about. But you might theorize that. Did you start to think that, Katie?

Katie Mangan Yeah, I did start to think that. And it became even more important to talk to the students involved to sort of cut through some of the conspiracy theories that are circulating around this. Like one of the things that I really wanted to do was to try to pinpoint some of the reasons that white students in particular might be turning away from college. And basically, in my conversations with the few people who I found who were willing to talk to me and with the students that I was able to talk to, I came across a few possible explanations. One of them clearly is demographic. Birth rates among white women have been falling at faster rates than some other populations. There are just fewer white students graduating from high schools who are in the pipeline to go to college. But it was the severity and the duration of the decline was so great, it was clear that it was more than just demographics. I think another issue that some people brought up was, you know, the economy. Unemployment rates are really low now and it’s possible for students to get decent paying jobs with a high school degree in some parts of the country. Maybe students were just all going the trade route. You know, maybe they were just getting jobs out of high school that didn’t require a degree and deciding not to go into debt. So that was another thing that we looked at. Then there was just a whole public perception about college. And this was where it was really interesting. A year or so ago, The Chronicle did this public perception survey, and one of the things that we found that was kind of surprising, and at the time we weren’t quite sure what to do with it, was we found that the skepticism about the value of a college degree was much, much higher among white respondents than minority respondents. White respondents were much less likely to say that a college degree was important or crucial to getting a good job. So at the time we thought, wow, that’s interesting. But, you know, maybe that had something to do with that, that white people, for whatever reason, were just more skeptical about whether college was worth the time and effort.

Jack Stripling Well, let’s talk about the students. What did they tell you?

Katie Mangan I definitely found that there were some students who decided not to go to college for mostly economic reasons. And I was able to track them down by looking in parts of the country where I saw that trade schools had been very successful in recruiting students who were unsure about whether a college degree made sense for them and where they were able to offer apprenticeships and work training programs that allowed students to start making, earning a living, right after high school. So one of the students I talked to was a young man in Iowa. He was not at all sure that college was right for him, but he was someone who had grown up on a farm. He was interested in working with his hands. And he discovered, during his senior year in high school, a program that trained him to be an electrician. So he’d take courses in the morning and then he would go over and train under a journeyman trainer. And so by the time he graduated from high school, he had a job working as an electrician, continuing to get sort of apprenticeship training. And for him, he said it just made so much more sense than going into a lot of debt. It made more sense to skip college, go straight into the workforce. And here’s something that I can do that allows me to work with my hands. I don’t have to spend a lot of time in college.

Jack Stripling Is there any evidence that those types of opportunities are more available to white students than students of color?

Katie Mangan Yeah. Interestingly, there was a study that came out of the Georgetown Center on Education and Workforce that found that there are a lot of these training opportunities available in rural areas of the country, but that the benefits really weren’t distributed equally. What the study found was that white students who went into these workforce training programs earned higher wages than did Black or Hispanic workers. And this sort of tied with what I’d heard from one researcher who said that she felt that a lot of white students today were more confident of their ability to get a decent paying job right out of high school without a college degree than were many Black and Hispanic students. And she felt that many minority students felt like, to get the same job or the same pay, they had to have more education and that that could have been one of the reasons that they felt that college was more important than many of the white students who responded to our survey who thought, you know, we can get by without college.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute

BREAK

Jack Stripling So there are, you know, myriad factors and reasons as to why students across different demographics may or may not be coming to college. But one thing we do know is that right now, politically, there is a lot of hot rhetoric around colleges not being welcoming to conservative students. Can you talk about that political conversation, Daarel? And then maybe we can talk to Katie about whether it’s affecting why white students may or may not be going to college.

Daarel Burnette This rhetoric has really ramped up in the last couple of years where you have politicians out there saying that college has been like seized by these administrators who are only trying to indoctrinate you with liberal ideas around race, sexuality and gender and making you feel guilty for being white, that you are somehow the oppressor, etc. And that has really sort of damaged or sullied the reputation of colleges.

Jack Stripling Katie, did you talk to any students who said they’d receive that political message and it factored into their decision not to go to college?

Katie Mangan Yeah. I reached out to a group called Turning Point USA because I figured they would probably be able to direct us to a student who bought into that idea. It’s a conservative, it’s an advocacy group whose founder, Charlie Kirk, has been sharply critical of higher education and diversity efforts in particular. Turning Point USA put me in touch with someone who had actually started out in college and dropped out because she felt it was not welcoming to her as a conservative Christian student.

Jack Stripling And I assume this was a white student?

Katie Mangan This is a white student, yeah. Morgonn McMichael was telling me that she served on the board of her sorority, and she got a lot of pushback because of some social media posts she had made that were favorable to Trump. She also wore a MAGA hat around, which didn’t go over well in the sorority, and she was asked to kind of tone down her MAGA advocacy because it wasn’t a good look for the sorority, she said. And she really took offense at that. She said, you know, my sisters were able to, you know, do all of the pro-Biden posts they wanted and there was no pushback. So that was one example. And then she ended up dropping out of Texas Tech, she says, just because she felt it wasn’t welcoming and she was beginning to wonder whether she really even needed a college degree to do what she was doing. And what she ended up doing was being kind of a social media influencer. She ended up working for Turning Point USA and going around and talking to young people about why college might not make sense for them, why she felt colleges really were woke, as the terminology goes.

Jack Stripling So she ends up sort of proselytizing against higher education.

Katie Mangan: Yeah. Yeah, she did.

Jack Stripling: So and, you know, the jury’s out on how much that messaging affects people who may not go to college at all. But it’s certainly a possibility, and it’s certainly live and well in our political rhetoric. Talk to me about other people you spoke to in the course of your reporting.

Katie Mangan [ I spoke to another young woman named Angela Otto, who grew up in a small town in rural Wisconsin. And she said that she was never a particularly strong student, wasn’t crazy about sitting at a desk and working. She’s also someone who always liked to be outdoors, is really interested in the environment, but couldn’t quite picture studying that in college. But there was an expectation, I think, in her family and in her high school that everyone goes to college. So she picked the college close by, a technical college we thought was probably the most comfortable fit. But after a couple of semesters there, she said, you know, it just didn’t feel right. You know, I wasn’t into it. So she said she got in a van, headed west, headed out to Bend, Oregon, and ended up in this Conservation Corps program that allowed her to jump right into the field, so to speak. Instead of her laptop, she was using, she learned to use a chainsaw, and she was learning how to clear trails, and learning a lot about the environment in a way that she felt that she might not have in a classroom. And she’s found it very exciting. She got a firefighting certificate. She learned a lot of skills. She gained a lot of skills she thought that she might not have gotten in a classroom and she was able to earn a paycheck. Of course it was a very small paycheck. She could barely get by, splitting an apartment with her boyfriend, but she was making a little bit of money and not taking on college debt, and she was out in the field doing what she wanted to be doing. So she thought, you know, I can do this without college.

Jack Stripling So, it sounds like you picked up on a few threads in your reporting that tell us something that could be significant, even if it’s anecdotal. I’ll recap a few of them. One possibility is that white students are finding employment that doesn’t require a college degree, and they’re seizing on that. Another possibility is that conservative students think colleges are hostile to their politics, and they’re opting out as a result of that. But there’s a third theory that I want to ask about, and it relates to the larger conversation we’re having about DEI. Did you find evidence in your reporting that white enrollment is declining because colleges have focused their recruitment efforts on other groups, like Black students? Did colleges take white students for granted?

Katie Mangan I think despite what you hear about these massive DEI bureaucracies at a lot of colleges, the reality is that on most campuses, a DEI office, if there is an office, might consist of 1 or 2 people. And it just isn’t realistic to think that these people are making that kind of headway in the college enrollment numbers that they’re sending people, sort of armies of people out to recruit minority students and ignoring white students. I mean, that’s just not happening. They don’t have that kind of impact. A lot of what DEI offices are doing, too, is more focused on retention efforts. We don’t have these sort of armies of people going out and recruiting minority students. When I went to the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where there is actually a very, very large — they would probably even admit that it’s a bureaucracy — it’s a lot of people dedicated to DEI. Even there, with all of the recruitment efforts that they’re making in a state that is 14% Black, I think the numbers of undergraduates, it’s under 5% Black. So DEI officers, DEI officials, are not moving the needle on enrollment numbers the way some people might think that they are.

Jack Stripling Katie, we’ve talked a lot about race, but I’m curious how income might factor into this story. I think some people have a gut level perception that middle and upper income white families are still encouraging their children to go to college and that these enrollment declines might be more prevalent among lower income or rural students. What do we know about how income figures into this larger trend of white enrollment decline?

Katie Mangan Well, that’s another weird thing. There’s actually recent data to suggest the opposite of what you might think. We’re now seeing that fewer white undergraduates from more affluent neighborhoods have enrolled in college over the past six years, and that’s not true of lower income neighborhoods. Those white students are actually enrolling at slightly higher rates. So this is somewhat counterintuitive data that was put out in October by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Jack Stripling Interesting. So a lot more to think about. What does all this mean? Where do you think this story is headed?

Katie Mangan Well, there’s still a lot we don’t know. As I said before, there’s not a lot of research out there on white enrollment declines. We’re all trying to figure out what’s driving this, but the new data about income adds another wrinkle. Wealthier students typically pay more to attend college, and there are big implications for the higher education business if those students start opting out. A lot of colleges are tuition dependent, and this could be a revenue issue for them. And of course, there are bigger issues at play. If white students stop going to college at the rates they once did, that raises interesting questions for society and the workforce. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

Jack Stripling Well, a lot to think about, a lot to continue reporting on. Thank you for coming here and talking to us about this data and about your reporting. Katie, Daarel, I really appreciate it.

Daarel Burnette Thank you.

Katie Mangan Thank you so much, Jack.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.