The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) published its biannual report on college enrollment trends this morning, providing a comprehensive look at how student numbers totaled up in fall 2024. NSC’s preliminary figures, released in October, initially reported a significant drop in college freshman enrollment. That finding, however, was the result of a data error; this morning’s release of the corrected numbers shows that enrollment actually increased.
But enrollment did not rise evenly across the board; rather, vocational schools and high-value college majors drove much of the increase. Graduate school enrollment also rose substantially. Overall, four significant trends stand out from the latest NSC data. I explore each of them in turn below.
The FAFSA debacle affected enrollment much less than many expected. The Biden administration’s mishandling of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) relaunch led applications for federal Pell Grants and student loans to drop by 325,000 (nine percent) among high school seniors and other first-time applicants last year. Yet while early indications suggested the debacle had translated into significant enrollment plunges, the latest NSC data shows that freshman enrollment actually rose by six percent. Community colleges drove that increase, suggesting that the FAFSA chaos might have led students to choose more inexpensive colleges rather than forgo college entirely (a trend consistent with prior evidence).
Vocational schools are showing strong growth. Community college enrollment is rebounding after a steep decline during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the drivers of that increase are community colleges with a vocational focus, which saw enrollment rise by 110,000 (14 percent) in the last year. Vocational schools are now well above their enrollment levels in 2019. Community colleges which focus on transfers to four-year institutions, by contrast, saw enrollment increase only two percent last year—and they enroll nearly half a million fewer students than they did in 2019. The message from students is straightforward: they want higher education to deliver a clear path into the labor force.
Students are increasingly choosing high-value college majors. Consistent with the prior trend, students at the four-year college level also seem to be more mindful of the financial returns on their education. Enrollment is rising in fields of study that typically deliver high earnings after graduation, including nursing and health (up eight percent) engineering (up six percent), and computer science (up six percent). Enrollment shrank in lower-paying fields such as the liberal arts (down three percent) and English literature (down two percent), while it remained mostly flat in fields like journalism and the arts. This shouldn’t surprise us: Students consistently tell pollsters that what they most want from college is a high-paying job.
An increase in graduate school enrollment should have us worried. Enrollment at the undergraduate level has recovered most of its losses from the pandemic, though it’s still a hair below its level in 2019. However, students are piling into graduate schools in droves: graduate-level enrollment is up 244,000 (eight percent) over the last five years; most of those new students are in master’s degree programs. Unfortunately, the financial returns to master’s degrees are far less reliable than the returns to bachelor’s degrees, and master’s students typically graduate with much higher student debt burdens. Even as students choose higher-value programs at the undergraduate level, increases in graduate school enrollment could be cause for concern.
In sum, there’s plenty of reason for optimism in the NSC numbers. The Biden administration’s FAFSA debacle seems to have been less impactful than expected. While rises in master’s degree enrollment are concerning, trends at the undergraduate level are headed in the right direction. Students have awakened to the reality that not all higher education is equally valuable—and have begun to make more careful choices.