Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Inside Higher Ed

Sarah Weissman

April 19, 2023

Anew digital tool aims to help campus leaders prepare for an impending demographic cliff, a steep drop in the traditional college-age population in certain parts of the country starting in 2025. The interactive data visualization tool shows enrollment and population trends by state and institution type and projects future demographic trends out to 2030, disaggregated by race and gender.

The Student Trends and Enrollment Projections Dashboard, or STEP, was recently launched by the Sorenson Impact Center at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, which seeks to help organizations maximize their impact through strategic investments, and which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The dashboard draws on data from the College Scorecard, the U.S. Census and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS. It also tracks trends in distance learning and student migration, the number of students who attend college outside their home state, and where they go. The data are broken down by state and by institution type.

Megan Brewster, director of impact strategy at the Sorenson Impact Center, said the goal of the new tool is to help campus leaders better “understand who have their students been historically and who might they be in the future.” They can also see which populations are growing in their states but aren’t enrolling at the same rate in order to launch more targeted recruitment efforts, she added.

The new tool was in the works prior to the pandemic, but it’s being introduced at a time when higher ed leaders are hyperfocused on enrollment in the wake of precipitous declines amid COVID-19. Colleges and universities lost roughly a million students between 2020 and 2022, with particularly steep drops at community colleges, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The downward trend, however, preceded the pandemic, with enrollment peaking in 2010 and falling 16.7 percent between then and now, a loss of more than three million students, a news release from the Sorenson Impact Center noted. Demographic shifts have loomed ominously in the background in the meantime.

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