Higher education enrollment is on a decade-long decline. It’s pretty much inevitable that enrollment in U.S. higher education will be down for 10 consecutive years. The latest estimates from the National Student Clearinghouse show fall ’20 enrollments down 2.5% over last year. This will further the slide for spring ’21, which will end up being a decade’s worth of dropping enrollments for degree-seeking students. All told, at the peak in spring of 2011, 19,610,826 students were enrolled in U.S. higher education. By spring of 2020, that number had eroded to 17,458,306. I predict it will dip under 17 million this spring – making it a net loss of more than two and a half million students over the last decade.
