By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Five minutes
Important Update: In January 2025, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) announced a methodological error in its Fall 2024 semester "Stay Informed Report and Special Analysis of 18-Year-old Freshmen Report." Data from these reports showed declines in 18-year-old freshman postsecondary enrollment in the fall 2024 semester, but the NSCRC now notes that “subsequent research finds freshmen enrollment increased this fall.”
Consequently, the below analysis is now inaccurate and should not be used in any publication reflecting fall 2024 enrollment.
Have questions? Contact Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, at debaunb@ncan.org.
The good news: overall postsecondary enrollment grew for the second consecutive fall, building positive post-COVID-19 pandemic momentum.
The bad news: fall semester freshman enrollment declined by 5% year-over-year, which was driven by a 6% enrollment decline for 18-year-olds. These declines come on the heels of a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) cycle
that saw many students and families experience delays in award letter receipts and other disruptions in the application and matriculation process; FAFSA completions for class of 2024 high school seniors are currently down 8.9%. These disruptions appear to have had a negative impact on high school seniors making the transition to postsecondary institutions, and freshman declines are steepest at four-year institutions serving the highest
percentages of Pell Grant recipients.
The findings come from new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC), released today, which offer the first comprehensive national look at fall 2024 term
enrollment. The findings include:
Nationwide, enrollment grew by 3% compared to fall 2023, the second consecutive year of fall term enrollment growth.
For 18-year-olds specifically, freshman enrollment declined by 6%. The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) commissioned the analysis of 18-year-olds’ outcomes (versus 18-to-20-year-olds as a group) to better understand matriculation patterns
for students directly from high schools.
19-to-20-year-old freshman enrollment dropped even more steeply, declining almost 9% this semester relative to last year.
Freshman enrollment (for students aged 24 and younger) declined across all income levels but particularly in the middle three quintiles’ enrollments at four-year institutions. Freshman enrollment from the bottom and second-bottom quintiles of neighborhood
income saw their enrollment decline by 4.6% and 7.6%, respectively.
Four-year public institutions with high Pell Grant recipient enrollment percentages (36% or more) saw their fall semester freshman enrollment decline by 10.4%. Private non-profit four-year institutions saw a decline of 10.7%. Two-year institutions
saw a modest year-over-year growth of 1.2%.
White freshman enrollment declined most sharply year-over-year (-11.4%). Black and Latino/a students saw their freshman enrollment decline by 6.1% and 1.4%, respectively. Asian students saw their enrollment decline by 2.8%.
“Freshman fall enrollment is a telling outcome of an admissions cycle. These preliminary numbers are cause for concern for the fall enrollment of the high school class of 2024, impacted by a troubled FAFSA rollout as well as the Supreme Court decision
banning race-conscious admissions,” said Kim Cook, NCAN CEO. “These data must be a call to action – to continue efforts to reach the high school class of 2024 to enroll this spring and to launch the 2025-26 FAFSA with full functionality
by December 1 to fully realize the promise of a simplified FAFSA,” continued Cook.
“It is startling to see such a substantial drop in freshmen, the first decline since the start of the pandemic in 2020 when they plunged nearly 10%,” said Doug Shapiro, Executive Director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center,
via a press release.
The NSCRC’s data are the first national analysis of enrollment during the 2024-25 FAFSA award year cycle. This cycle’s challenges have been well-documented by NCAN and elsewhere. The first look analysis updates the NSCRC’s interactive enrollment dashboard
for Fall 2024 as of September 26, 2024. It includes annual fall enrollment changes across the Fall 2022, Fall 2023, and Fall 2024 and displays year-over-year percent change.
The new data also considers enrollment by race/ethnicity, gender, age, and institutional sector and includes data on major fields and overall undergraduate and graduate enrollment trends by state.
The connection between FAFSA completion and postsecondary enrollment for high school seniors has historically been strong,
with the two figures moving in the same direction since at least the high school class of 2018. The national first fall enrollment rate data from the chart below comes from NCAN’s analysis of the NSCRC’s annual High School Benchmarks series.
NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker, an interactive dashboard that analyzes high school-level FAFSA completion data at the national, state, and local levels reported a 11.6% decline in the number of FAFSA completions by June 28 for class of 2024 seniors relative to the class of 2023. Summer supports and efforts from NCAN members and our partners across the country narrowed that decline
to -9.1% by August 30. As of October 11, that narrowing had slowed and the gap in the number of FAFSA completions
now stands at -8.8%, a year-over-year difference of more than 200,000 fewer seniors completing.
Notably, the FAFSA was not the only disruption to this year’s matriculation environment. This was the first college admissions cycle following the Students for Fair Admissions US Supreme Court cases. Practitioners and policymakers alike have been
waiting for these data to try to understand whether these cases would have a chilling effect on the matriculation of students of color. This bears a fuller future analysis, but for now we can see that Black and Hispanic freshmen had shallower fall
2024 term enrollment declines than white students. Additionally, Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) saw undergraduate enrollment gain of 3.2% and 5.9%, respectively. HBCU enrollment has been
particularly strong for two consecutive fall terms, and from fall 2022 to fall 2024 this segment of institutions saw undergraduate enrollment grow by 12.6%.
The 2025-26 FAFSA opens on December 1 and practitioners across the country are already working to ensure that we avoid
a repeat of the class of 2024’s experience and get postsecondary enrollment nationally back on-track for high school graduates. NCAN is maintaining a list of additional fixes needed to ensure FAFSA success for the 2025-26 cycle.
NCAN will report on additional forthcoming data we commissioned from the NSCRC next month. That data will include reporting coverage from more postsecondary institutions and offer enrollment data for freshman 18-year-olds as of October 31. That report
will also include enrollment changes by home state, which we will set against state-level FAFSA completions data to see the relationship between those two measures.
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