Tsunami: Higher Education Enrollment Trends
by Jeff Fisk
AS AMERICANS ENTER the new millennium, one thing is very clear: more Americans than ever before believe that getting a college degree is vitally important to their future prosperity and their opportunity to be part of the American Dream. For the second year in a row, this nation is setting a national enrollment record, with 14.9 million Americans in college. Enrollment is expected to increase by 1.5 million between 1999 and 2009, with full-time enrollment projected to increase by close to 14 percent.
This surge in enrollment is not unexpected. The real question is whether America’s colleges and universities are up to the challenge. America’s middle schools and high schools are already bursting at their seams and will be for years to come as they seek to educate a record number of young Americans, the majority of whom will seek to obtain a college degree.
In some states, colleges and universities are already feeling enrollment pressures, and in California, experts describe the coming surge of college students as a “tidal wave.” California is confronted with the daunting task of educating an additional 700,000 students by 2010, a 36 percent rise from 1998. California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed, in a recent Los Angeles Times interview, expressed his worries about the projected 42 percent increase in undergraduates there–a total of 117,000 students; “We’re talking about adding 12,000 students a year, every year. That’s like adding a complete new university a year for the next ten years.”
The majority of students will be enrolled in California’s community colleges:1.5 million in 1999 and 2.0 million in 2010. The increase at the community colleges accounts for approximately 74 percent of the new student enrollment. California State University (CSU) will experience a 37 percent increase and the University of California (UC) will see a 32 percent increase.
California is not the only state having to prepare for many more new students. The state university system in Florida expects up to 100,000 additional students by 2010. By 2005, Texas expects to have one million college students on campuses throughout the state, an increase of 73,000 students over 1998.
All total, Texas higher education experts estimate that 110,000 additional students will seek to gain a higher education between 1999 and 2010. States like Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina and Massachusetts are also feeling their own enrollment pressures. Newspaper accounts of campus housing shortages already suggest that college campuses are rapidly filling up.
This crush of new students comes at a time when many of our nation’s colleges and universities are already at full capacity and becoming more selective in their admissions process. The combination of these two factors–more students and greater selectivity–will make the pressure that high school graduates already feel to get into college even more intense in the years ahead. This comes at time when a record number of America’s high school students–80 percent, according to a recent Shell Poll–expect to go on to a 4-year college or university, a 2-year college or a technical school after they graduate from high school.
