Community Colleges See First Ever Double-Digit Decline in Enrollment Thanks to COVID
Community colleges were already hurting. Will COVID be the death of them?
Recent data has shown that COVID is killing community colleges. From The College Fix:
The question is not whether COVID-19 has impacted this enrollment but to what degree. COVID decline has to be set against other trends, to figure that out. And things have not been trending in community colleges’ favor.
Since 2009, there was already a trend of community college enrollment steadily declining. Between 2009 to 2019, enrollment at 2-year institutions dropped from 7.5 million to 5.6 million students, a 26 percent decrease, according to NCES data. In contrast, four-year institutions during the same time span saw a positive 10 percent increase in enrollment from 9.9 million students to 11 million students.
However, the decline in community college enrollment got steeper after the arrival of COVID.
In a report released in the fall of 2021, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center showed community college enrollment numbers had decreased from 2019 to 2020 by an alarming 9.5 percent from the previous year.
The enrollment numbers of community colleges have suffered a never before seen double-digit decrease of 11.3 percent from the previous year in the Spring of 2021, a report for Clearinghouse shows.
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Comments
Is it thanks to Covid, or is it the horse-manure course requirements that just aren’t worth it?
Community colleges will see a re-bound when people learn that is where they need to go to learn the stuff that they should have learned in high-school, but was no longer offered to make room for social justice courses.
That, or to allow for the children who, a century ago, were working menial jobs rather than being lied to about their abilities.
Note that the largest decline in students was for men:
https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/where-did-all-the-community-college-students-go-2/