Colleges and universities in Rhode Island will need to find creative ways to draw in promising students in the face of a steep enrollment decline that could become a cliff after 2025.
That’s the assessment of Daniel Egan, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Rhode Island, after analyzing a report on national enrollment projections that shows the declining number of high school graduates in New England will get more severe in the coming years.
Such projections translate to a much smaller pool of recruits for Rhode Island’s higher education institutions, most of which rely heavily on teens from the region to fill classrooms and dorm rooms. In turn, that could lead to a loss of revenue for the schools and a shrinking workforce of college graduates.
“We’re at a crossroads,” said Egan, whose group represents the state’s eight independent colleges. “There are headwinds coming.”
Rhode Island’s public higher education institutions aren’t immune, either.
The Community College of Rhode Island saw a 7% decline in enrollment during the pandemic last year, but data from the college shows that the number of students enrolling has declined from 17,983 in fall 2011 to 14,786 in fall 2019, before the pandemic hit.
Rhode Island College saw a similar decline in enrollment during the crisis last year.
‘It can’t be a static approach.’
SHANNON GILKEY, R.I. postsecondary education commissioner
John Taraborelli, a spokesman for RIC, said the school’s enrollment declined by 6% in the fall of 2020, which translated into a $6.1 million loss in tuition revenue. That enrollment decline followed a 10.9% increase in freshman enrollment in the fall of 2019.
Egan said the pandemic led to a loss of $250 million for colleges and universities in the state, but funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have offset those losses by more than 50%.
“We were fortunate to limit the hit,” said Egan, noting that schools could be facing potential impacts from the delta variant. “We had a flatline in enrollment because students chose to wait a year to return to school. So, we need to be aggressive in how we recruit to manage the upcoming demographic shift in the Northeast.”
That shift is forecast in a report released last December by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which concluded that the number of high school graduates in New England is expected to shrink by nearly 13% by 2037.
The decline could be as high as 18% for high schools in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, the commission said. The initial downward slope in the region’s high school graduates is expected to be modest, with much steeper drops projected to occur after 2025.
In the meantime, Egan said the focus for schools should be on the retention and recruitment of students both inside and outside of the state. The state’s legislative leaders should also grow student aid dollars to retain talent, he said.
To protect its enrollment numbers and foster recruitment, CCRI launched its “Late Start” program in 2020. The program offers a 12-week condensed semester for students who were delayed in registering and believed it was too late to enroll, according to CCRI spokeswoman Amy Kempe.
The school offers its tuition-free R.I. Promise scholarship program that was launched in 2018 and made permanent by state lawmakers this year. CCRI enrolled 1,584 eligible students at a total cost of $3 million in 2020 and anticipates enrolling about 4,000 students in 2022 at an estimated cost of $7.6 million.
Shannon Gilkey, Rhode Island’s postsecondary education commissioner, said colleges need to be “dynamic” in their response to enrollment decline, focusing their efforts to persuade more elementary and secondary students to aspire to seek higher education. The colleges should also tailor their programs for adults wanting to reenter the workforce, Gilkey said.
“It can’t be a static approach,” he said.
Gilkey, who was appointed earlier this year, said the state has set a goal to increase the percentage of Rhode Island adults with a college degree or credential to 70% by 2025. Right now, that number is 53%.
Gilkey has assembled an advisory committee to guide the needs and priorities for higher education over the next five years. Topics for the committee to advise on will be credentials and training that support the state’s economy, equity in enrollment, and understanding the composition and needs of modern learners.
“Higher ed is experiencing a major disruption right now because employers are in need of a more responsive system of higher education,” Gilkey said. “We have to figure out good, healthy, productive systems that bring industry into the education pipeline.”
One way that schools can be creative, he said, is to offer prior learning experience credits for adults who return to an institution to pursue a degree or skills training.
“I think that’s innovation,” he said. “That will accelerate adults back into the workforce.”
Gilkey said colleges need to advise young students and their families about what to expect when applying, while offering better job training and continuing education to adults. That means schools need to pivot and try fresh approaches to drive student enrollment.
“I’m not concerned that institutions can’t pivot,” he said. “I just think we have to start thinking about how to pivot because the populations will trend in a different direction at a different point in time.”
Cassius Shuman is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Shuman@PBN.com.
Strange focus and lack of depth to this article. The enrollment pool decline is particularly threatening to private colleges and each RI private institution faces the problem in its own way given a school’s strengths and weaknesses, yet this article provides no details on that aspect, but has more focus on RI’s public schools, primarily RIC and the RI Community College.
Private colleges are probably not so worried about the decline in student population as they tend to have a much larger pool of students from which to recruit, like the entire planet for example. I don’t think Brown is so concerned with the local drop when the vast majority of their student body doesn’t come from Rhode Island.