The 3 million student drop in college enrollment since 2010 is largely attributable to high schools shunning underperforming universities, a higher education economist says.
Preston Cooper said “most of the drop in college enrollment has occurred at institutions with the worst student outcomes.”
“At high-quality colleges, enrollment has actually increased,” Cooper, an economist for the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in an Oct. 8 article for National Review. He also has a longer report on the subject for AEI.
Cooper compiled data on colleges, including degree completion rates and median earnings after graduation. Most of the decline in enrollment is due a drop in enrollment at “low-quality institutions,” Cooper said.
He wrote:
Between 2010 and 2023, undergraduate enrollment at colleges in the bottom fifth of institutions dropped by 47 percent. For instance, the University of Phoenix, a major for-profit college chain, enrolled more than 330,000 students in 2010. But just a quarter of Phoenix’s students graduate, and earnings after enrollment are well below the national average. By 2023, undergraduate enrollment had dwindled to just 77,000 — a drop of more than three-quarters.
“Low-quality public and private nonprofit colleges also saw their enrollments plummet over the same period,” he said. “Almost all of the aggregate drop in enrollment is attributable to colleges in the bottom two-fifths of the student-outcomes distribution.”
He concluded that colleges have an “opportunity” to win over potential students by “improving outcomes and expanding higher-value programs of study.”
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