By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Three minutes
As the National College Attainment Network's (NCAN) resident, “purveyor of bad news from data sets,” I assure you it often feels just as weird for me to bring you good news as it is for you to receive it. We’re always triangulating when it comes to college
and career readiness data. There’s no, “one big thing” that says, “yeah, we did it.” But right now, at this moment in time, we’ve got some good news.
First, from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC), comes the news that freshman enrollment this past fall was up 4.3%. This is a hopeful
sign, but the 2.34 million students still lags the 2.49 million pre-pandemic figure. There’s still room to go and grow overall. Freshman enrollment growth was up across all institution types but strongest in the community college sector (+6.1%). This
community college enrollment growth was buoyed strongly by high school dual enrollment. Without dual enrollers, the community college sector would’ve seen enrollment dip by 1.5-2% according to Doug Shapiro,
Executive Research Director at the National Student Clearinghouse and NCAN Board Member.
Notably, it’s not all happy news from the NSCRC report. Overall undergraduate enrollment still fell 0.6% year-over-year, and while Latino/a, Asian, and Native American enrollments all increased, enrollment from Black students was static. The new analysis
also includes state-level enrollment estimates, so be sure to dive into those to get a sense of how your state is doing. Overall, this report is a good encouragement but not a complete relief. It is surely something that students and their advocates
can build from. Let’s keep the momentum going for the class of 2023!
It's important to remember that the NSC's StudentTracker suite of services lets districts, high schools, and other educational organizations access their own students' postsecondary outcomes for a fee. NCAN encourages organizations to track their students' progress using the StudentTracker.
Speaking of the class of 2023, we also have a few data points from them worth noting.
Let’s start with NCAN’s own FAFSA Tracker, which foresaw the results above. It’s no huge revelation that high school senior class FAFSA completion correlates with immediate college
enrollment, and, yeah, it happened again. High school seniors were up 4.6% last June 30, and, sure enough, here we get a 4.3% boost in freshman college enrollment.
It’s worth taking the sidebar here to talk about FAFSA completion and college enrollment. NCAN has consistently said that FAFSA completion is a leading indicator of college enrollment, but, notably, it is not the cause of that enrollment. It is much more
likely that students signal their already-held intent to enroll via completing the FAFSA as a milestone versus the reverse of completing the FAFSA, finding out their financial aid, and then deciding to enroll. Is it possible some students complete
the FAFSA, better understand the financial aid for which they’re eligible, and then enroll? Certainly. Is this scenario as prevalent as FAFSA completion serving as a milestone to complete among students who already intend to enroll in college following
high school? It is not as prevalent, in this analyst’s opinion.
June 30 FAFSA completion trends have pretty closely followed immediate college enrollment trends for years, but they’re not the only leading
indicator of college enrollment. College applications, for example, offer a pretty good indication, to put it mildly, of students’ demand for enrolling in college. Data from the Common App released late last year show that there was a 24% increase in “distinct first-year applicants,” and that huge jump isn’t year-over-year, it’s relative to pre-pandemic numbers from 2019. Applications from underrepresented minoritized
students grew by 37%, and first-generation applicants were up 43%. Derek Newton writes in Forbes that,
“these applications and applicants may not mean there’s a surge coming in enrollments this fall. The uptick may mean only that The Common App has become more popular. Though admissions services outside The Common App say applications in their systems
are also up.” Notably, Newton continues, “we won’t know if this is a genuine enrollment bump until these applicants become students - or they don’t.”
If you’re looking for something to be hopeful about, this trio of data points, FAFSA completions, college applications, and freshman enrollments, all being up certainly gives it to you. We know we need more educational attainment in this country to benefit
students and their families as well as communities, states, and the nation overall. A trendline where these indicators are going up is a step in the right direction to reach said attainment.
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