Mass. college enrollment drop continues
Photo | Grant Welker
Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester
The number of college students enrolled in Massachusetts continued to fall this spring in step with a national trend, according to a new report.
The state's total enrollment fell by 1.2%, or more than 5,100 students, hitting 426,137 this spring, according to the nonprofit trade organization National Student Clearinghouse. Enrollment in Massachusetts is down 6% in the past five years.
Nationally, enrollment declined year-to-year by 1.7%, continuing a drop in the number of college students since at least 2015, the report said.
For Massachusetts, the new data is a fresh reminder of challenges ahead for schools fighting for a shrinking high school-age population. Colleges, including in Central Massachusetts, are battling that trend as they work to keep fast-rising tuition and costs affordable and to update their curricula to match workplace demand increasingly calling for jobs in health care and technology.
Those trends can be especially important in a city like Worcester, which counts roughly 30,000 college students at its nine colleges. Massachusetts ranks 11th in the country for how many college students it enrolls.
Liberal arts, humanities, foreign languages and education had some of the most notable enrollment drops nationally. Computer sciences, architecture and transportation had some of the largest gains.
Graduate and continuing education programs were one bright spot. National enrollment in such programs at four-year public schools rose by 1.7%, and at four-year, private nonprofit colleges by 5.8%, a figure the National Student Clearinghouse said was inflated a bit by for-profit colleges converting to nonprofit status.
Hit the worst were two-year public schools, a category that includes Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester and Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, with a 3.4% drop nationally in just the past year, continuing a sharp drop in recent years.
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