Americans are rethinking their relationship with college

US undergraduate enrollment rose last fall for the first time in over a decade, per a twice-yearly report from the National Student Clearinghouse.

But when it comes to higher education, more and more students are having commitment issues. The NSC found an increasing number of students are opting for two-year community colleges (+2.6%) instead of seeking conventional four-year degrees (+0.6%).

• For community colleges in particular, schools focused on vocational programs saw a 16% increase in enrollment – while schools focused on transfers to four-year colleges saw a 0.2% bump.

Some other key insights:

• Older students are driving freshman enrollment. While the number of freshman students aged 20 and below remained flat in 2023, overall US freshman enrollment increased by 0.8% due to a sharp uptick in Americans aged 21 and older signing up for college.
• More high schoolers are dual-enrolling than ever before. Community colleges reported a 5.2% annual increase in high school dual-enrollment, continuing a years-long upwards trend. High schoolers currently account for nearly 1 out of every 5 community college students.
• College demographics are slowly changing. Last fall, undergraduate enrollment increased among all major ethnoracial groups except white (-2.0%) and Native American (-1.0%), while the enrollment gap between genders shrunk slightly (currently 56% female to 44% male).

📸 Big picture: College enrollment historically has been similar to the trajectory of the MCU – exciting at first, but overplayed and stale after a while. Between 1980 and 2010, the percentage of US high-school graduates who attended college rose from 49% to 70%. But then, in the early 2010s, that figure reversed course and began to decline, eventually reaching its current level of 62%, per Labor Department data.