What COVID-19 Has Meant for College Enrollment

During a typical year at my institution, Kenyon College, our fully residential campus can get loud. Students shout at their friends as they spot one another leaving class or on the way to the dining hall. Faculty and staff wander the paths together, sometimes with their children, fresh from pickup at the elementary school down the road. Weekends can be especially noisy affairs, as I listen from my home in the middle of campus to students passing by, reveling in the joys of nights away from their studies. These sounds of campus are of course not unique to Kenyon, but they nevertheless make Kenyon feel like home. 

Campus has been muted this past year. The COVID-19 pandemic meant a sudden dispersal of all our students last March, and a gradual reentry into campus life this year, with about half our students invited to be in residence in the fall and three-quarters in the spring. And campus has changed in many ways for these students who have returned to residency: Raucous social gatherings — really, social gatherings of any kind — are no longer permitted. Once-languid meals in the dining hall are now only available in quick increments, or via takeout. Even as courses continue (in modified fashion), the campus that many students fell in love with changed — and the lives of our students changed, too. 

This is a year unlike no other (a cliche by this point, but one that still holds true), but in many ways this 2020-21 academic year is vastly different than what institutions faced in spring 2020. Everyone had their lives upended in March 2020, but students were presented with a choice over the summer: whether to return to a college experience filled with uncertainty. What would campus and class be like? And would shifting circumstances at home, especially due to the health and economic ramifications of the pandemic, even enable a return to school? The COVID-19 pandemic has led many more students to consider the course of their education in new and profound ways: whether to continue their studies linearly (on a traditional four-year plan), or to take branch points and take time off, for myriad personal reasons.

Nationally, this has led to historically low enrollment among new students, and particularly among Native American, Black, and Latinx students. But the COVID-19 pandemic has also put a spotlight on the extent to which institutions rely on financial models that are based on predictability of re-enrollment, or retention: who stays and who goes. These models, untouched by an extreme external force, were reliable (to a degree) for years. But models of predictability no longer work.

Retention has always been key to making the budgets balance at colleges; the initial size of an incoming class is important, but so too is making sure those students continue to enroll through graduation. At a small, heavily tuition-dependent institution like mine, the withdrawal of even just 10 students for a semester can take a dramatic toll on our budget projections. It’s more than just dollars lost from tuition, room and board: While some students return to their studies after time away, others do not, and this volatility makes it hard for colleges to plan — especially when colleges must build their budgets a full year in advance of their next fiscal cycle, and must calculate how many new students to admit in order to offset financial losses from withdrawn students. This dynamic is felt, too, on campus, as faculty contend with unpredictable demand for their courses, student clubs unexpectedly lose their leaders, student research projects are put on pause or shelved entirely. All of the rhythms of campus life that normally hum along have been shaken by COVID-19’s effect on retention.

The dynamics around retention are not new for every college, nor are their effects the same. For some schools, and some populations, the choice to attend college routinely happens not just at the outset, but at every turn. Kenyon’s student population — 18- to 22-year-olds, mostly well-resourced, mostly white, fully residential — is perhaps the student population most in the public eye, but it’s not typical. Most college students are what we would actually consider non-traditional: students who are older, financially independent, taking care of a child or other dependent, and/or employed full-time. These student populations are more likely to have lower retention rates. At community colleges (where these students are overrepresented), enrollment dropped more than 10 percent last fall. But even for schools like Kenyon, maintaining healthy retention rates and thinking about retention in new ways will be essential to combating revenue stress from potentially slow enrollment growth due to changing age demographics.

A number of schools have already adopted innovative strategies to keep students enrolled, particularly those who are low-income and/or first-generation. Institutions including Elizabethtown College and Virginia Commonwealth University are more intentionally engaging with families of first-generation students, to provide better holistic support structures. St. Cloud State University developed a “Sense of Belonging Index” to help the institution better assess and address their students’ overall experiences on campus. Georgia State University, where more than half of new full-time students are Pell-eligible, put into practice an intense use of predictive analytics to keep students on track in their degree programs; the university reports a seven percentage point improvement in its 4-year graduation rates since the program began. Student-centered approaches like these help institutions maintain high enrollment and better deliver on their missions to educate students and prepare them for success after graduation.

Boosting retention rates is about more than just good business sense. Yes, institutions depend on tuition dollars from enrollment, but it’s also important that our students complete their studies and graduate. Not everyone will finish college in four years, or six, but we must make sure institutions are continually engaging students so they can make progress toward their degrees and make good on their investment in their education. 

As I wrote in an earlier post, we must pay attention to the nuances of each student’s individual experience. This also means that retention strategies at Kenyon might not work at a different institution, such as community colleges or minority-serving institutions. But the overall takeaway is the same: We must not forget that students choose a college every semester, not just once in their lifetime — and these choices have consequences not just for students, but for the institutions themselves. To serve students well, and to survive this economic downturn, institutions must take a fresh look at retention strategies — an examination made more urgent by COVID-19, but that will have effects long after the pandemic has run its course. 

Sean Decatur is the 19th president of Kenyon College.