Is College Enrollment Falling?

A recent Wall Street Journal declares “More High-School Grads Forgo College in Hot Labor Market.” An accompanying chart and data show the apparent plunge, with just 62% of recent high school grads enrolled in college, down from 66.2% before the pandemic, and well down from the high in 2009 of 70.1%.

The article recites the usual reasons. The high and increasing financial cost of attending college. The increasing opportunity cost due to the “hot labor market” mentioned in the headline. Large numbers of young people getting apprenticeships: apparently a 50% increase over some unstated timeframe!

They give anecdotes. A 21-year-old male in Maryland was put off by the high cost of a four-year degree. He likes working on cars, so instead got a job as a service technician at a Toyota dealership.

We’ve heard this all before. In fact, we know we’ve heard it before, because the WSJ article links to other WSJ articles saying the same thing over the past few years.

But are young people really skipping traditional four-year colleges for other opportunities? The answer is a big fat No. And we can even use the same data the WSJ used (from the CPS) to prove it, but slice it more finely. The percent of recent high school graduates enrolled in 4-year colleges and universities in 2022 was 45.1%. That’s slightly higher than 2019 (44.4%) and is, in fact, the second highest level ever in this data, with only 2016 being higher at 46%.

So what gives? The decline that the WSJ is reporting is entirely driven by a decline in enrollment at 2-year colleges, though you would never get a hint of that in the article. You might even think it was the opposite: perhaps young people are forgoing 4-year colleges in favor of trade schools! Nope. Here’s the data.

Notice that this is in fact the exact same data as the WSJ is using. If you add the two figures for 2022, it’s the same 62% in the WSJ article. But 4-year college enrollment is up slightly since 2019, while 2-year enrollment is down about 5 percentage points. Also, it doesn’t really seem like a pandemic-induced change: this is a long-run decline in 2-year college enrollment of about 12 percentage points since the peak in 2012.

You can find the data for 1993-2021 from the Digest of Education Statistics and the 2022 data from BLS (but it all comes from the Current Population Survey).

There’s definitely an interesting story to be told here! However, it is not at all the one that the WSJ and countless other media outlets are reporting. Are young people who might have gone to 2-year schools finding that they can just learn their skills on the job? Are 2-year schools not actually offering degrees that are relevant anymore? Something else? These could be true, but notice that these are the stories we often hear about 4-year college enrollment decline, not 2-year colleges.

But there is no decline, in percentage terms, in the number of high school grads going to college. It is quite stable. There is however one big concern on the horizon: the number of high school graduates will start declining over the next decade and a half. This is due to the decline in birth rates about 18 years ago. That’s a big concern, and colleges have been preparing for it for years. Well, 4-year colleges have been planning for it. Have 2-year colleges? I don’t know. But they should too.