The first freshman class after the peak is on campus, and the early counts show where it went missing. Michigan’s fifteen public universities opened this fall with 254,107 students, 2 percent fewer than last year and 12.6 percent fewer than in 2017, and a first-time freshman class 1.2 percent smaller than last fall’s. Tennessee’s public universities and community colleges grew 1.3 percent, and first-time freshmen at its community colleges rose 3.6 percent. The National Student Clearinghouse’s preliminary national count, released Oct. 29, has total enrollment up just 0.2 percent and undergraduate enrollment among 18-year-olds down 0.7 percent. It will be read as one flat number when it should be read as two maps.
The first map is the one the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education has drawn since 1979. Its latest projections put the number of American high school graduates at a peak of about 3.9 million in 2025, with a 13 percent decline from that peak by 2041. Thirty-eight states lose graduates between 2023 and 2041. The Midwest and Northeast have already been losing them, WICHE expects Michigan alone to lose 20 percent, and the South gains 3 percent. This fall’s entering class is the first on the far side of that peak, and the projection runs downhill from here.
The second map is institutional, and Michigan draws it in detail. Since 2017 the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus has grown from 46,002 students to 54,181. Over the same nine years Central Michigan fell from 23,335 to 13,524, Eastern Michigan from 20,313 to 11,468, and Western Michigan from 22,894 to 16,696. The flagship takes a larger share of a shrinking pool, and the regional campuses built out for the era of universal enrollment absorb the loss. Graduate headcount across the fifteen schools fell 4.9 percent in this one fall, and the Clearinghouse’s preliminary count has master’s enrollment down 3.7 percent across the country. Neither report gives a cause, and there are at least two candidates: graduate international enrollment fell 5.9 percent nationally the year before, and this is the first fall in which new graduate students borrow under the federal caps.
