The Wave Approaches

It has been in the news lately. The University of Tulsa is undergoing massive restructuring based projections that many private colleges will not survive the next decade due to declining college enrollments projected to hit in 2025. This topic is very active within leadership at the University of Arkansas with hints of a 30% or greater enrollment decline coming that could be a factor in the University going to responsibility centered management (RCM). If you do not know what this is, the University of Arizona is already there and has a good FAQ; for a glimpse at the dark side of RCM in higher ed read this.

I decided to have a look at the student forecast myself. The starting point for national numbers is the Elementary and Secondary Information System (ELSi) within the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Got that?

Well, back at ELSi there is something called the tableGenerator. The idea is to see if there is dip in elementary students moving through the system that will show up at my doorstep, so to speak, someday. I chose to look at first grade students (6-7 years of age). In the tableGenerator there are four tabs; in tab1 I chose 'State', tab2 'years 2009-2017' (the last year available), tab3 'Enrollments > Enrollment by Grade > Grade 1 Students (State)', tab4 'All 50 States + DC', then hit the Create Table button. The resulting table has each state on a row and each year in a column, with totals on right and bottom. A handy excel export button brings the data down to my local machine to make a graph.

The result is shown below. There is a definite peak in the data at year 2014. Kids in the first grade in 2014 were born in or after 2008 - the year of the great recession. If you have somehow forgotten about the Great Recession see this wikipedia article. Those same kids will start college (age 17-18) in 2025. The national first grade data shows a drop of 5% in total enrollment between 2014 and 2017, implying a college enrollment drop across the US between 2025-2028 with no bottom in sight (or at least in the data). Of course this is a questionable implication, it assumes US college enrollment is only driven by the number of college-age students in the US, that the drop will be felt equally across size and type of institutions, etc. But there it is. 

The ELSi table contained Arkansas (AR) data so it can be plotted on its own. A big shout out to my sister-in-law Gigi (a career teacher in AR) who put me on to the AR Department of Education who ran a report for me that brought the AR data up to 2019. Shout out to Connie C. for that! The result is shown below. First off, the data seems to have a glitch between 2013 and 2014, maybe a change in counting rules? Anyway, the same general features are present that are on the national numbers: a 2014 peak followed by a significant decline. With the AR data carried out to 2019 we see the decline flattening, but not bottomed out. The peak-to-trough decline over 2014-2019 is 7.7% -- significant but far from a 30% drop. 

Just for the record, the U of A 2018 official enrollment was 27,778 and a 7.7% decline would be 25,639 students (a loss of 2139). To be fair, the argument is not just about raw input student numbers, but public institutions being disproportionately affected and well-heeled private institutions poaching the best available students nationwide.

But, to me, it looks more like a wave than a tsunami.