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…