By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Five minutes
Total postsecondary enrollment rose about pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels in the Fall 2024 semester driven by strong undergraduate (+4.7% year-over-year), freshman (+5.5%), and 18-year-old freshman (+3.4%) growth that is a welcome surprise and bit of good news for the higher education sector. The data comes from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s (NSCRC) Current Term Enrollment Estimates report released last week.
This increase in freshman enrollment is especially good news for students, colleges and universities, and the United States economy because more students this year are receiving Pell Grants. According to the US Department of Education, 730,000 more students
received Pell Grants in fall 2024, an increase of 14%.
Affordability and a lack of financial aid are the number one reason why students drop out or fail to enroll in education beyond high school, so the increase in Pell Grant recipients means we will likely see more Americans getting the degrees and credentials
they need to launch successful careers. It is excellent news that Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) simplification is working as intended to help more students of limited means afford education after high school. With the enrollment
growth in-hand for this semester and momentum building for future years, Congress must continue to approve Pell Grant funding that meets the needs of all these eligible students.
All of last cycle, the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) said that it would take a Herculean effort for the caring professionals with an interest in students’ postsecondary futures to assist those students. Make no mistake: that effort materialized this year for the class of 2024, both in reducing the size of FAFSA completion declines and in getting students to enroll. Without the support of college access advisors, school counselors, financial aid administrators, and so many others, we would not be seeing this surprising increase in postsecondary enrollments in fall 2024.
Overall freshman enrollment (not just 18-year-olds) saw its largest gains in the four-year, private, for-profit (+26.1% year-over-year), two-year public primarily associate’s-granting baccalaureate (PAB), and public two-year (+6.8%) sectors. For 18-year-olds
specifically, PABs (+7.7%) and community colleges (+5%) saw the largest gains. Given the well-documented FAFSA challenges for the class of 2024, it may be that high school seniors who did not complete the FAFSA or who were waiting for delayed aid
offers decided to enroll at their local community college where tuition would be most affordable.
Other top line observations we make from the new release include:
Overall, the strongest enrollment gains were at public institutions, indicating that students were seeking affordability.
Four-year private institutions with high Pell Grant enrollments experienced a large decline of 6.3%, perhaps because students couldn’t wait for delayed financial aid packages.
Freshman enrollment at community colleges serving the highest share of Pell Grant recipients saw the largest rate of growth this fall (+8.6%).
The 10.5% decrease in Black student enrollment at highly selective institutions exceeded declines for students of other races and may be related to the end of the consideration of race in admissions decisions or the chilling effect of that the US
Supreme Court decision had on students’ application or enrollment choices.
Certificate enrollment is up 9.9% (+101K students). Undergraduate certificate enrollment is now 28.5% higher than in the fall 2019 semester.
Diving deeper into the report by student demographics, the NSCRC finds:
Undergraduate enrollment increased for Latino/a, Black, Asian American, and multiracial students for the third consecutive fall semester.
White enrollment increased by 1%, marking the first increase for this group from pre-pandemic levels.
Dual enrollment (students aged 17 or younger) increased a whopping 10.2%.
While 18-20 year-old enrollment grew 3.1%, students older than 25 saw enrollments growing even faster. For example, 25-29 year-olds were up 6.1% while those over 30 climbed by 6.7%.
Male and female students saw similar enrollment gains.
Undergraduate enrollment by neighborhood income climbed across all five quintiles, but the bottom quintile (+7.3%) and second-bottom (+6.4%) grew fastest.
Specific to freshman enrollment, the report notes that freshmen enrollment gains were even larger than overall undergrad enrollment (+5.5% vs. +4.7%). Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander freshman enrollment (+10.5%) grew the most year-over-year followed
by Asian American (+6%), Latino/a (+5.4%), and Black (+3.4%) students while white freshman growth was a more modest +1.2%. Native American students rose 0.1% year-over-year Notably, freshmen choosing not to report their ethnicity to their institution
grew 51.5% year-over-year. The NSCRC notes, “As a result, ethnoracial trends could be larger this fall, but are dampened by the growing rise in students choosing not to report their race or ethnicity.”
An important feature of the NSCRC’s reporting here is its inclusivity in disaggregating Native American, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Multiracial students.
The NSCRC's findings are surprising given past trends. This year is the first since NCAN's FAFSA Tracker launched in 2017 that the FAFSA completion rate by high school seniors declined
while fall freshman enrollment increased. NCAN will continue to explore potential causes of the variance in FAFSA-enrollment behaviors and the compatibility of the data sets that track them. Moving forward, we expect that FAFSA completion will still
be a valuable predictor of postsecondary enrollment.
Last month the data told a very different story, one of steep declines for 18-year-old freshmen nationally and in 46 states. However, the NSCRC identified a methodological error that undercounted enrolled college freshmen as dual-enrolled college students.
The CTEE report, which uses a different methodology, fixed this error and identified the good news about fall 2024’s enrollment gains. The special analysis of 18-year-old freshman enrollment is revised and updated here.
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The author is grateful to the NCAN team for their thoughtful edits and additions to this analysis.
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