At the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the United States is entering a period of unprecedented demographic shifts affecting higher education. Not only are many states already seeing fewer high-school graduates, with more facing this trend as the decade progresses, but in all but a few regions overall population growth will level and…

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, commentators in broadly accessible media have offered a surfeit of predictions about the future of higher education. Due to the absence of accountability mechanisms, however, the accuracy of these claims has been heretofore unknown. Research shows that op-eds and other forms of public scholarship influence public…

Institutional staff such as enrollment managers, business officers, and institutional researchers are often asked to predict enrollments. Developing any predictive model can be intimidating, particularly when there is no textbook to follow. This paper provides a practical framework for generating enrollment projection options and for evaluating…

While Markov chains are widely used in business and industry, they are used within higher education only sporadically. Furthermore, when used to predict enrollment progression, most of these models use student level as the classification variable. This study uses grouped earned student credit hours to track the movement of students from one…

Projecting higher education enrollments requires a thorough understanding of the phenomena that impact student enrollment. Popular theories that have been used to project enrollment include human capital theory and consumer choice theory; more than a dozen other theories have also been cited in the literature. This article situates selected…

The decline in childbirths in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-9 will reverberate into the 2020s and 2030s. This will lead to fewer high school graduates, and fewer students with the family background and finances to propel them into traditional college enrollment. Early college programs have been a success story in American education,…

No one policy exists as a nexus between K-12 public education and post-secondary education in the United States. Three critical factors suggest that many colleges will be financially insolvent after 2020. The first is declining K-12 birthrates, which are enrollment feeders of post-secondary colleges or universities. As a result of the declining…

We investigate the rapid influx of overseas students into UK higher education and the impact on the number of domestic students. Using administrative data since 1994/5, we find no evidence of crowd out of domestic undergraduate students and indications of increases in the domestic numbers of postgraduate students as overseas enrolments have grown.…

This report provides an overview of enrollment trends and enrollment projections at both the undergraduate and graduate level, by sector, for public colleges and universities in South Carolina. Using institutional enrollment data from the late 1970s through 2014, statistical models were built for each sector to determine which factors influence…

Providing support for institutional planning is central to the function of institutional research. Necessary for the planning process are accurate enrollment projections. The purpose of the present study was to develop a short-term enrollment model simple enough to be understood by those who rely on it, yet sufficiently complex to serve varying…

The hard choices that must be made to balance budgets at higher education institutions can be painful and have dramatic consequences that may linger for years. If enrollment projections and therefore tuition income/budgeting projections for future years are inaccurate, then the result may be unnecessary or insufficient budget reductions, both of…

Higher education in Australia is undergoing a comprehensive reform with particular focus on higher levels of attainment by increasing access to university study for Australians from all backgrounds. To support the government's ambition of around 217,000 additional graduates by 2025, it has committed to removing caps and funding student places on…

This issue of "Policy Insights" reviews the results from Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education's (WICHE's) annual survey of tuition and fees at public colleges and universities in the region. The survey on which the report and this policy brief are based was administered to state higher education executive offices or system…

The bull market for admissions is nearing its end. The number of new high-school graduates in the United States has increased steadily each year since the mid-1990s, and colleges have seen the number of applications climb right along with it. As the last of the baby boomers' children make their way through high school, the number of new graduates…

As external forces demand change in the delivery of postsecondary education and institutions seek to take advantage of new opportunities, the potential for achieving higher levels of student and institutional success is vast. New technologies, communication tools, data use, and organizational constructs present key factors in improving the…