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Education Dive
Fewer undergrads enrolled at community colleges this summer: report
Natalie Schwartz
Sept. 1, 2020
Dive Brief:
While summer undergraduate enrollment ticked up at public and nonprofit
four-year colleges from a year ago, it fell at community colleges and
four-year for-profit institutions, according to new data from the
National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Fewer students were also pursuing associate and undergraduate
certificates this summer than in 2019, while more were enrolling in
graduate and bachelor's programs.
The report offers a glimpse at how the coronavirus pandemic affected
summer enrollment, though it's too soon to tell how fall numbers will
be impacted.
Dive Insight:
Enrollment rose at community colleges and for-profit institutions
during the Great Recession. Those types of schools are "where adult
students typically find the accessible programs that best meet their
needs when they're weathering an economic storm," said Doug Shapiro,
executive director of the Clearinghouse's research arm.
But the current crisis is different from previous economic downturns,
with the pandemic shutting down or severely limiting entire sectors.
"There's so much that was unexpected in this report," Shapiro said.
For one, the report found that summer undergraduate enrollment declined
5.6% year-over-year at public two-year colleges and 7% at four-year,
for-profit institutions. Meanwhile, undergraduate enrollment at public
and private nonprofit four-year colleges rose by 2.8% and 4%,
respectively.
The report found vast enrollment differences by demographic groups.
Summer enrollment of Black students, for example, declined by 6.1%,
compared to a 2.1% drop in 2019. White students' enrollment fell by
2.3% in summer 2020, though that's up from a 3.6% decrease last year.
And enrollment of Asian and Hispanic students increased by 8.5% and
3.3%, respectively.
Although several news media reports speculated that community colleges'
enrollment could rise in the fall as students seek out less expensive
higher education options, these schools only saw increases to their
Asian and dual-enrollment students this summer. Enrollment fell across
all other groups based on race and ethnicity, age, gender and location.
Black students saw the largest percentage decrease, with their
enrollment falling by nearly 11% at public two-year schools. Although
it was beyond the scope of the Clearinghouse report to explore why
these shifts occurred, the pandemic has disproportionately affected
people of color.
Black and Hispanic people are much more likely to catch the coronavirus
than White people, according to data cited by the New York Times in
July. The coronavirus is more than twice as likely to kill Black people
than White and Asian people, according to one effort to track such
data. Moreover, workers of color have seen especially large job losses
since the coronavirus took root in the U.S., ProPublica reported in
July.
Overall, graduate summer enrollment increased by 3.8%, compared to a
0.4% rise last year. Education consultancy EAB projected in a recent
report that the pandemic will bring in more graduate students, which
will help colleges offset declines in undergraduate students.
However, the pandemic could thwart some students' plans. In a survey of
more than 1,000 people, most of whom were current and prospective
students of undergraduate and graduate programs, EAB found that many
adult students who had planned to return to college may hold off
because they lack the ability to finance their education.
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