'Losing A Generation': Fall College Enrollment Plummets For 1st-Year Students

[ASTalumna06]

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/92583...bCybFBJ8MppYJg

According to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse, undergraduate enrollment this fall declined by 3.6% from the fall of 2019. That's more than 560,000 students and twice the rate of enrollment decline seen last year. Most of that decline occurred at community colleges, where enrollment fell by more than 10%, or more than 544,000 students.

"To see this level of decline all at once is so sudden and so dramatic," says Doug Shapiro, who leads the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse. "It's completely unprecedented."

Students attending college for the first time represent one of the largest groups missing from college classes this fall, Shapiro says. For students who graduated from high school in the class of 2020, the number of graduates enrolling in college is down by 21.7% compared with last year, based on preliminary data. For graduates at high-poverty high schools there was a 32.6% decline in attending college, compared with a 16.4% decline for graduates of low-poverty schools.

"That's a lot of individuals whose lives are on hold, whose career and educational aspirations are suspended," says Shapiro. "You can almost think of this as an entire generation that will enter adulthood with lower education, lower skills, less employability, ultimately lower productivity."

Shapiro says the pandemic is largely to blame for this year's drastic declines, but it's also true that attending college has been on a decade-long downward trend. College enrollment nationwide fell 11% between 2011 and 2019, the Clearinghouse found.

The obvious question here on Greekchat is: what will this mean for Greek life in both the short and long term?