The National Student Clearinghouse has recently published their fall 2020 college enrollment rate estimates for recent high school graduates. This report provides updated information from a December 2020 version of this report with the addition of approximately 50 percent more data from high schools and colleges and restated to correct a process error that resulted in an overestimate of the rate of decline in college enrollment counts throughout the previous version of the report.
The latest data covers approximately 860,000 graduates from nearly 3,500 high schools and their immediate fall enrollments in 87 percent of all postsecondary institutions that participate in the Clearinghouse to manage their enrollment information. Key findings from the update are below:
- Data has continued to display little impact of COVID-19 on high school graduation in the year 2020.
- With an updated 50 percent more high schools reporting, the overall high school graduate numbers in 2020 have remained at 2019’s level which indicates that high school graduation rates were unaffected by COVID-19.
- Low-income and high-poverty high schools showed small declines from the year 2019 to 2020 (declines of 0.7% and 1.3%, respectively).
- The immediate college enrollment rate declined in the year 2020 by almost seven times the decline in 2019 (decrease in 4.1 percentage points versus a decline in 0.6 percentage points, respectively).
- Prior to the pandemic, the year-to-year changes in enrollment numbers varied little by high school characteristics like poverty, income, number of minorities enrolled, and urbanicity. However large disparities became apparent during the pandemic.
- In 2020 enrollment rate gaps grew wider across income, poverty, and minority high school characteristics.
- Enrollment declines were 2.3 times steeper for students from low income high schools compared to students from higher income schools (a decrease of 10.7% compared to 4.6%, respectively).
- Community college enrollment dropped the most for students from low-income high schools.
- Public four-year enrollment was unaffected by the pandemic for high-income high-schools.
- Overall, 2020 graduates entering a community college declined by 13.2 percent in contrast to a 1.3 percent increase in 2019. This decline is 4 times greater than the decline of entrants to public four-year institutions (-3%), and 2.5 times greater than the decline at private nonprofit four-year institutions (-5.2%).
