Current Term Enrollment Estimates: Spring 2020. A COVID-19 Supplement: With New Data Submitted in April and May 2020

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6

COVID-19; Pandemics; Enrollment; Enrollment Trends; School Closing; Distance Education; Part Time Students; Full Time Students; Withdrawal (Education); Leaves of Absence; Racial Differences; Undergraduate Students

With ongoing campus shutdowns and online-only classes amid the COVID-19 crisis, uncertainties abound for students and colleges planning for the fall. There is a critical need for real data and reliable information about how students are responding. By leveraging the student-level data that colleges submit multiple times per term to the National Student Clearinghouse, this supplement aims to provide near real-time enrollment information to help institutions, states, and the nation better adapt and plan in the months ahead. The "Spring 2020 Current Term Enrollment Estimates Report" (May 2020) showed that as of the start of the term, pre-pandemic, the steady national declines in college enrollment over the last few years had slowed slightly, from about 1.5 percent annually to just 0.5 percent this year. The supplement looks at changes since the start of term, using new enrollment data submitted by institutions in April and May, to create a first-ever analysis of intra-term enrollment status changes. This report focuses on undergraduate students and indicators of change such as reduced or increased enrollment intensity, withdrawal, leave of absence, and new enrollments. The new focus, enabled by tracking the monthly enrollment statuses of individual students between January and May of 2020, creates a first quantification of the disruptions and changes to student enrollment pattern that may have been induced by COVID-19. [For "Current Term Enrollment Estimates: Spring 2020," see ED609890.]

ERIC

2021

ED609891