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.
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