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A new analysis from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) illuminates the impending declines in the number of recent high school graduates.
Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates confirms what colleges and universities have been anticipating (based on WICHE’s previous analyses) for many years — that the total number of high school graduates available for higher education to enroll will peak this year and decline through 2041.
WICHE’s Knocking at the College Door, released in December 2024 with support from College Board and Lumina Foundation, is the 11th edition of a series dating to 1979. Watch the official webcast release and access the slides here: https://www.wiche.edu/knocking/resource-library/
According to one of the co-authors of the new edition, Patrick Lane, Vice President, Policy Analysis and Research at WICHE, the latest analysis reaffirms some of the top-line findings of recent reports — that, primarily because of declines in the number of births, became more severe starting in 2008, the number of high school graduates is peaking this year and will decline 13% nationwide through 2041.
That demographic change, coupled with declines in the share of students opting for college, will create significant challenges for tuition-dependent institutions. Beneath the top-line numbers, however, are important variations, including in the changing racial and ethnic makeup of the cohort and vastly different outlooks for different states
Knocking at the College Door shows that the relative share of the young adult population who identify as white is projected to decline from 48% of the total public high school graduating class in 2023 to 39% in 2041, along with the absolute numbers. In the meantime, however, the share of the young population who identify as Hispanic will grow steadily to represent 36% of the high school class of 2041. The share of Black graduates is projected to decline from 14% to 12% of the total
And students who identify as multiracial will increase dramatically, though from a smaller basis, to represent 7% of high school graduates in 2041. Some of that increase likely accounts for seeming declines in the number of Indigenous populations and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander students. These students are much more likely than students of other races and ethnicities to also identify as another race or as Hispanic, with the end result being that only about one quarter of youth who identify as American Indian/Alaska Native are categorized as such, with the others falling into the Hispanic or Two or More Races categories. The proportions are similar for Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander youth.
In short, says Lane, since Knocking at the College Door began disaggregating this data in the 1990s, “The overall message hasn’t changed too much in 25 years, and that is that future high school graduating classes will be made up of more students who higher ed has served poorly — in particular, more Hispanic students and more multiracial students.”
That makes the need for colleges and universities to improve their teaching practices even more urgent.
“If we haven’t been doing a terrific job at meeting the needs of these students and they will make up a larger proportion of future classes, it puts the onus on everybody associated with higher ed to solve that puzzle of how we meet the needs of every learner,” Lane says. “How can we do better going forward?”
He adds that this means closely examining how digital learning is implemented: “By coupling this report with the idea — which is beyond cliché — that digital learning is the future, it becomes essential for the field to figure out this challenge. I certainly think digital learning is part of that solution.”
Regional variation in demographic change
Lane cautions individual colleges and universities against relying too much on the top-line national data point noted above — a 13% decline in the number of high school graduates nationwide.
“Very few institutions that draw from a national pool of students have huge cause for concern,” he says. “Most are drawing from a smaller pool of students. The differences state by state and even within states, which are substantial, are more important. It is a different story depending on where you’re located and where you’re drawing students from.”
For example, in Hawaii, the decline for high school graduates will be more like 33% by 2041, while North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana will see some increases.
Selection from WICHE’s Knocking at the College Door data visualization tool
Similarly, when the shifts occur over the projection will vary. In some states the number of high school graduates will continue a long and steady decline, while in others the number will hold comparatively steady for several more years.
To help readers understand their local context better, WICHE published an accompanying set of data visualization tools that lets colleges and universities customize reports by geographic location like state and region, and by race and ethnicity. Readers can build customized charts with criteria most important to their needs.
Compounding effects: Births times enrollment rate
Lane also cautions against conflating high school graduation trends with college enrollment trends. The impending nationwide decline in the number of high school graduates is compounded by an independent decline in the college-going rate among those graduates — from a historical high of 70% in 2016 to 62% recently.
“That’s a big deal,” he says. “While enrollment declines have been going on for the past five years (with the most recent data potentially beginning to reverse that trend), it’s important to recognize that those declines have been coming as we have been seeing an increasing number of high school graduates. So the environment is going to become even more challenging.”
Another factor to consider is changes in the rate of participation in K-12 education itself. For a variety of reasons, a child born 18 years ago may not be enrolled in high school this year and showing up in the graduation numbers. The COVID-19 emergency could be one new reason, but Knocking at the College Door ultimately found that the effect of the pandemic appears to be modest. In the report, WICHE estimates that the pandemic may be responsible for a decrease of about 750,000 total high school graduates (or between 1% and 2% through 2037).
The pandemic-related learning loss of the students who do graduate and who colleges and universities enroll will likely be a much bigger challenge to wrestle with, Lane says.
Putting Knocking at the College Door to work in the classroom
This edition of the WICHE demographics analysis explores improvements in the higher education landscape that are or could be made at the level of state and federal policies and at the level of institutional transformation.
“Some are very much at the classroom level in ways I think that feed right in with Every Learner’s work,” he says. “How can you improve pedagogy? How can you improve the student experience in ways that impact retention and completion?”
The takeaway from the report that Lane wants to emphasize for faculty, instructional designers, and academic deans is that — irrespective of the total count — the students showing up in the classrooms are changing. “That means leaning into all the ways we can help students engage with the course material, thrive in it, and understand it becomes even more important,” he says.
“How can we take down some of the barriers that are in place? Whether we feel they are barriers or not is unimportant compared to whether students think they are barriers. And some of that is on the instructional side. The bottom line is we have to do more, and we have to do better with the students we are getting.”
Future Research
WICHE is far from finished with its work on future demographics. Upcoming supplements to the report will include an analysis of projections looking at differences between trends for male and female graduates and providing new information about future populations in U.S. territories and Pacific nations that participate in U.S. education programs (the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau). Beyond that, Lane says WICHE may look to provide states and the higher education community in general with better information about the types of high school students that historically have had a medium likelihood of immediately enrolling in college, operating under the theory that these may be the students who would benefit from targeted policies and practices to provide them with meaningful and valuable college pathways.
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