First-time college enrollment is falling fast; down more than 5% last year

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Admission will not get easier but smaller non prestigious private schools are going to shut down. The students that would have went to those schools will be pushed into larger universities and community colleges.

So, you do not believe that admissions are going to get easier across the entire range of colleges in the USA?

NP. No. Not by a long shot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

YEP. The "regular" families get screwed over and over, including for college. We are living this right now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

You should be immensely grateful to not be poor.

Screw you. You don't get to tell people how to feel. When others are getting FA to go for free and you're footing $30k/year after scrimping and saving for 20 years to be able to fund a 529. But "poof" others just get the same education for free. It's not ok.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

You should be immensely grateful to not be poor.

Screw you. You don't get to tell people how to feel. When others are getting FA to go for free and you're footing $30k/year after scrimping and saving for 20 years to be able to fund a 529. But "poof" others just get the same education for free. It's not ok.

Pretty sure you wouldn’t want to be poor, even if it meant your kid could go to college for free. Grow up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

There are a lot of options out there. Create a new post with your kid's stats and people will suggest. It's how I found out about some great merit for my kids years ago (Tulsa for NMF; URichmond; Davidson Belk scholarship etc). You just have to cast a wide, sometimes haphazard net.

SLACs will have more merit money to give now, with the repercussions from the tax bill. Target them strategically based on your kid's profile, geographic area, major, stats, etc.

Top SLACs don't give merit money so nothing changes there. Top SLACs may also become more selective as they are not hit hard by all of the federal budget cuts and as the poster mentioned the top SLACs will get tax savings which offset some or all of the minimal budget cuts that they did get. They already had the best teaching experience of all schools outside of Engineering/CS and these changes will allow them to maintain or improve their teaching and experience advantages relative to their R1 competition.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Admission will not get easier but smaller non prestigious private schools are going to shut down. The students that would have went to those schools will be pushed into larger universities and community colleges.

So, you do not believe that admissions are going to get easier across the entire range of colleges in the USA?

No, it will not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

There are a lot of options out there. Create a new post with your kid's stats and people will suggest. It's how I found out about some great merit for my kids years ago (Tulsa for NMF; URichmond; Davidson Belk scholarship etc). You just have to cast a wide, sometimes haphazard net.

SLACs will have more merit money to give now, with the repercussions from the tax bill. Target them strategically based on your kid's profile, geographic area, major, stats, etc.

Top SLACs don't give merit money so nothing changes there. Top SLACs may also become more selective as they are not hit hard by all of the federal budget cuts and as the poster mentioned the top SLACs will get tax savings which offset some or all of the minimal budget cuts that they did get. They already had the best teaching experience of all schools outside of Engineering/CS and these changes will allow them to maintain or improve their teaching and experience advantages relative to their R1 competition.

There are a lot of SLACs outside the top 10.

[Anonymous]

There’s also a big demographic shift happening. The class of 2025 graduating high school was the height of a demographic boom. After that year the graduating class shrinks

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

YEP. The "regular" families get screwed over and over, including for college. We are living this right now.

Blame your state govt. They have been consistently cutting education budgets as an 'easy fix' for decades.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

You should be immensely grateful to not be poor.

Screw you. You don't get to tell people how to feel. When others are getting FA to go for free and you're footing $30k/year after scrimping and saving for 20 years to be able to fund a 529. But "poof" others just get the same education for free. It's not ok.

What is your solution? Free college for all or no FA at all? Let's see who you are.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

There are a lot of options out there. Create a new post with your kid's stats and people will suggest. It's how I found out about some great merit for my kids years ago (Tulsa for NMF; URichmond; Davidson Belk scholarship etc). You just have to cast a wide, sometimes haphazard net.

SLACs will have more merit money to give now, with the repercussions from the tax bill. Target them strategically based on your kid's profile, geographic area, major, stats, etc.

Top SLACs don't give merit money so nothing changes there. Top SLACs may also become more selective as they are not hit hard by all of the federal budget cuts and as the poster mentioned the top SLACs will get tax savings which offset some or all of the minimal budget cuts that they did get. They already had the best teaching experience of all schools outside of Engineering/CS and these changes will allow them to maintain or improve their teaching and experience advantages relative to their R1 competition.

There are a lot of SLACs outside the top 10.

There are lots of SLACs outside of the T10 and they are great schools. However, most of those schools weren't paying endowment taxes and thus aren't pertinent to the post that I was commenting on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The American Dream is over. America is no longer a meritocracy where through hard work you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make a future for you and your family.

Baloney. I work with (legal status) refugees where they come not knowing the language, plucked out of refugee camps where they have never even seen a cell phone contract or bill. Within 5-10 years all of my families have managed to buy a house, kids are fluent and being educated, everyone is working and getting by even with lower paying jobs.

100x yes. One such family immigrated here 12 yrs ago and now they are sending their oldest to a top 10 after she graduated number 2 in her class, 1530 with tons of APs. The elite school gave far more need based aid than others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The thesis of this thread is incorrect. It was a data error.

Freshman college enrollment was on the upswing in the fall, not declining as the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported in October, the prominent research group said Monday.

The organization, which produces widely used data on college enrollment, said a “methodological error” skewed its preliminary calculation of the number of first-year students who enrolled in fall 2024. The center initially said freshman enrollment dropped 5 percent, the first decline since the pandemic and an apparent indication of the fallout from the troubled rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

In a written statement, the center’s executive director, Doug Shapiro, said some students were mislabeled as dual-enrolled in high school and college classes, rather than as college freshmen, and “as a result, the number of freshmen was undercounted, and the number of dual-enrolled was overcounted.” The mistake inflated the number of high school students taking college classes through dual enrollment and affected the organization’s analysis of enrollment trends among 18-year-old freshmen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/01/14/college-freshman-enrollment-increase-data-error/

Hilarious - no one even responded. One simple Google search proved your correction accurate:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/05/22/college-enrollment--increases-again-approaching--pre-pandemic-levels/

Youtube link from OP? 7 months old
Forbes article? May 2025
Numbers:

"The nation’s colleges and universities received good news on the enrollment front.

Total college enrollment grew by 3.2% this spring compared to spring 2024 and now stands at about 18.4 million students nationally, just 0.9% less than the prepandemic level of spring 2020. This year’s gain is equivalent to about 562,000 students.

The latest numbers are contained in the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s Current Term Enrollment Estimates Spring 2025 report. Undergraduate enrollment grew 3.5%, reaching 15.3 million, which is about 2.4% (378,000 students) fewer than the pre-pandemic level..."


lol

Enrollment in graduate programs increased 1.5% (46,000 more students) compared to last year. Graduate enrollment now totals slightly more than 3.1 million, 7.2% higher than in 2020. That cumulative gain represents 209,000 more graduate students than the pre-pandemic number.

[Anonymous]

Admission to ultra selective colleges might get a tiny bit easier, such as having an acceptance rate that increases from 4% to 6%. Still single digit though. For non-selective colleges that accept pretty much any warm bodies, few care about acceptance rates anyway and certainly not the elites at DCUM.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pricing out the donut hole family. Got it. It just sucks to be us in every way, shape, and form.

Not poor enough to get FA, but not rich enough to front $30k every year for 4 yrs for in state tuition, and feeling bummed about the frugality and tons of sacrifices over the decades to just to fund 529s, retirement, and general monthly expenses.

You should be immensely grateful to not be poor.

Screw you. You don't get to tell people how to feel. When others are getting FA to go for free and you're footing $30k/year after scrimping and saving for 20 years to be able to fund a 529. But "poof" others just get the same education for free. It's not ok.

Pretty sure you wouldn’t want to be poor, even if it meant your kid could go to college for free. Grow up.

DP. That’s just it- many of these aid recipients are living the same life, in the same neighborhoods. They just never saved. They spend, spend, spend and have credit card debt. Their salaries are similar $200-250k—bit one is retired with an educator wife-so report low HHI. It’s not as clear cut.

The things we did honestly end up penalizing us for FA.