https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/28/can-americas-colleges-and-universities-be-saved/
American colleges and universities continue to lose students steadily.
The latest statistics confirm their continuing decline. Here’s some headline numbers:
The number of total enrolled postsecondary students declined 3.3 percent year-over-year, the most significant rate of decline in enrollment since 1951. This number has declined nearly 10 percent since 2010, from 21 million to 19 million.
College enrollment totaled 15.9 million undergraduate students nationwide in Fall 2020, a 4.3 percent decline year-over-year. This number has declined more than 12 percent since 2010, from 18.1 million to 15.9 million.
Full-time college enrollment has declined more than 11 percent since 2010, from 13.1 million to 11.6 million.
Community college enrollment declined by 10 percent in 2020 alone. California’s community colleges lost 17 percent of their total, about 300,000 students, between Fall 2019 and Fall 2021.
Men are barely 41 percent of students enrolled in college, they are six percentage points less likely to complete college than women, and the hemorrhage of male enrollment continues unabated.
The proportion of college-age Americans (18-29) enrolled in higher education has been declining since 2016.
Seventy-five nonprofit colleges and universities have closed or merged since 2016, more than one percent of the total.
In other words, the structural crisis in higher education that the National Association of Scholars (NAS) diagnosed early in the COVID pandemic, in our Critical Care recommendations, continues to afflict American higher education. America’s colleges and universities cannot staunch their bleeding, no matter how many transfusions of taxpayer dollars they receive from the federal and state governments.
