A recent Wall Street Journal article’s title captured the concern of many in higher education in 2025: America’s College Towns Go From Boom to Bust (WSJ). Based on their national analysis of 748 public four-year colleges and universities, the authors found that “enrollment at the most prominent state universities increased 9% in 2023 compared to…
In our previous blog post, we introduced the new 2025 Carnegie Classification system. Since its inception in 1973, the Carnegie Classification system has primarily relied on its Basic Classification framework that served as an overarching designation for institutions of higher education. The new 2025 Carnegie vintage expands the single Basic Classification into three separate classifications:…
The more than 50-year progression of the Carnegie Classification system has led to arguably the largest revision since its inception in 1973 with the recent release of the 2025 Carnegie Classification framework. Through its most recent update in 2021, the “Basic Classification” served as an all-compassing designation for institutions of higher education that recognized institutional…
For a moment, let’s take a stroll down memory lane in Texas higher education. Traveling back 25 years, we stop in the fall semester of 2000 to see that total enrollment at Texas public colleges and universities was just over 862,000. Of those fall 2000 enrollees, 17,784 (2% of total enrollment) were dual credit students,…
Most of the blog posts during this spring semester have been focused on the future of higher education enrollment in Texas and the nation. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) recently published fall 2024 enrollment data, giving us our first glimpse into current statewide and institution-level trends across Texas. Last fall, public institutions of…
Building on our previous blog posts, we continue our spring series on enrollment trends in higher education. Our first post in the series reviewed updated birth-related data that showed the United States experienced a 17% decrease in the number of births from 4.32 million in 2007 to 3.6 million in 2023. This national ‘birth dearth’…
In continuing our spring series on enrollment trends in higher education, it is no coincidence that one of the hottest topics of conversation currently circling is the “enrollment cliff.” From legislative hearings to board meetings to podcasts to newsprint, the pending downturn in higher education enrollment, closely linked to the “birth dearth” in the United…
For a number of years, much of the talk in higher education circles has been about the pending ‘enrollment cliff’ that is projected to have widespread effect over the course of the next 10-15 years. The publication of Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education (Grawe, 2018) brought the concept of the ‘demographic cliff’ to…