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…
In our first post of this new series, we saw that Texas is forecasted to have the highest number of jobs added to its economy by 2034 when compared to other states in America. The 2.8-million job increase from the actual 13.9 million jobs in 2022 to the predicted 16.8 million jobs in 2034 places Texas…
With the start of the 2024-2025 academic year, most people in education view life from the perspective of new beginnings. However, for millions of students across the country, the start of the fall semester actually means their college-level course of study is coming to a close. For these students, they will be hitting the full-time…
This blog entry serves as the final in our summer series presenting data and insights from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s (THECB) “Texas Talent Trajectory (T3)” project. Our previous blog posts have explored data on educational outcomes for members of the three-year 8th-grade cohort (FY2011-FY2013) based on success measures at three different timepoints: high school graduation,…
We continue our summer blog series reviewing the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s (THECB) “Texas Talent Trajectory (T3)” project. In our previous blog post, we presented data on educational outcomes for members of the three-year 8th-grade cohort (FY2011-FY2013) based on students’ economic status, finding that just over 9 percent of economically disadvantaged students completed a…