Big Drops in Enrollment Hit Colleges in the First Fall of the Pandemic. Who Was Able to Bounce Back?

After the pandemic began in early 2020, colleges grappled with a frightening prospect: What if first-time students skipped going to college in the fall?

Many colleges’ fears about attendance, of course, came true. And the drop in first-time students — whose numbers drive enrollment each year — proved to be especially steep at community colleges.

A big question loomed for the following fall: Would enrollment be able to bounce back?

A Chronicle analysis of federal data offers some insights about how the enrollment of first-time, degree-seeking students at more than 2,600 colleges in our sample fared the following year. Read on to see whose enrollments recovered, whose started clawing their way back, and whose kept falling.

But first, let’s look at how pervasive the declines were in the first fall following the pandemic’s start; enrollment in The Chronicle’s sample fell at about three in four institutions.

We were particularly interested in what happened at the harder-hit colleges, where enrollment dropped by 10 percent or more. Despite high hopes that first-time student attendance would rebound in the fall of 2021, that outcome largely didn’t pan out, The Chronicle’s analysis shows. The inability to recoup enrollment losses was most evident at public colleges.

For some types of colleges, the road to recovery was more uphill than most. Of the 560 institutions classified as associate colleges and whose first-time student enrollment fell by at least 10 percent in 2020, only one in 20 recouped the students they lost the following year. On the other side of the spectrum, about 25 percent of doctoral institutions saw enrollment return to pre-pandemic levels.

Of the 1,257 colleges whose enrollment fell by at least 10 percent in the fall of 2020, 137 recovered the first-time students they lost by the fall of 2021. Another 540 didn’t fully recover but saw enrollment headed in the right direction. At another 573 institutions, however, enrollment continued to drop. And at seven institutions — three of them community colleges — first-time enrollment dropped in 2020 and stayed at the same level the following year.

Methodology

Data is from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Ipeds). Enrollment data is for all first-time degree-seeking students. Only degree-granting Title IV-eligible colleges in the U.S., including Washington, D.C., in 2021 are included. Colleges that did not have 2019 and 2020 data are excluded.