Disappearing White Students

In this episode

When it comes to college enrollment, admissions officers and civil-rights advocates often talk about historically underrepresented groups, including Black and Latino students. But white-student enrollment has dropped 19 percent since 2018 — more than any other racial group. People in higher education often seem reluctant to talk about it.

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Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Katie Mangan Were there some white students who were hearing that message that colleges just weren’t welcoming to white students and that it was actually impacting their decisions whether or not to go to college?

Jack Stripling Over the past couple of years, many of the biggest stories in higher education have centered on race. In 2023, a U.S. Supreme Court decision, striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, sent shockwaves throughout the country. Under President Donald Trump, the war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in higher ed and beyond has kicked into overdrive. What all this will mean for students of color is a topic of preoccupation and concern among higher ed officials and civil-rights advocates. But there’s another, quieter story playing out on college campuses that no one seemed to see coming. White students are opting out of college at rates higher than any other demographic group. It’s a somewhat counterintuitive fact that is puzzling to researchers, journalists, and colleges. And it’s adding new complexities to a larger conversation about where the country is headed.

Today on the show, we’ll talk to two of my colleagues at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Katie Mangan and Daarel Burnette, about what may be driving this white enrollment trend. {snip}

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Daarel Burnette Yeah, so we knew, post-pandemic that the enrollment decline was just very dramatic across the board and was causing all sorts of headaches for colleges as to how to get these kids come back to college. So when we were brainstorming how to write about this, I did what most Black journalists do, which is, you know, we should really write about Black folks, because I know just anecdotally that typically when the country gets a cold, Black folks get a fever. So we decided to write a story about Black enrollment. But as we were going through the data, the numbers just didn’t jive. Over time, we started getting more clues that there was something unusual happening when it comes to demographics, race and enrollment. One of the stories we did was about a trustee at a college in Minnesota in which he said at a board meeting, there’s just too much diversity on this college campus. And that got him into a lot of trouble. There was a lot of hysteria. People wanted him to resign, etc. But one of our data reporters looked into it. And sure enough, not only was the white enrollment declining at a faster rate than the Black and Latino enrollment there was, but she just also discovered that this was having detrimental effects on the overall enrollment because the drop was so significant.

Jack Stripling So it’s an inflammatory statement, but actually the data shows there’s something to it. That actually there are fewer white students at this college.

Daarel Burnette Yeah, exactly. And that’s kind of stuck in the back of my head because it was like, this guy is saying something that’s really controversial, but he also might be, there might be a little bit of truth to what he’s saying. So there was another story that a reporter was doing on why some flagships were, why their enrollment was dropping at such a dramatic rate and why they were having to do these huge budget cuts. So as he was doing the story, one of the sources just said passively, well, these white kids just are not going to college. And the source didn’t really have a lot of context as to why that was or didn’t really understand why it was. But he just said it so confidently. I just knew that there might be something there. So we asked one of our data reporters, Brian O’Leary, to look into this and what he discovered was just really shocking.

Jack Stripling Well, I want to get to that. And I want to turn to Katie, but just to kind of sum this up. A lot of what you’re talking about is what we as reporters do, which is we just start hearing things and sometimes we’re hearing things that are counterintuitive, which might turn on your Spidey senses a little bit. And in this case, that happened. So Brian pulls together some data and Katie, who does some on the ground reporting on this, starts looking into it. Katie, what did the data that was gathered show about declines in white enrollment?

Katie Mangan Well, what the data showed, which I found really surprising, was that since 2018, enrollment among white students has dropped by 19% across all sectors. And this is public private, two year, four year, selective, not so selective. It’s all kinds of of institutions. But the drop in white enrollment was nearly three times the overall drop in enrollment for undergraduate institutions, which was a little closer to 7%. So that was just really surprising.

Jack Stripling So, can you put those figures into some perspective? How many students are we talking about?

Katie Mangan It’s significant. If you look even further back to 2012, we’re talking about a decline of more than two million white undergraduates across the country.

Jack Stripling Wow, so what did the data tell us about other populations? What about Black and Hispanic students?

Katie Mangan We saw declines in Black students, but not at the same levels we’re seeing with white students. Between 2018 and 2023, Black undergraduate enrollment declined by 11%. Hispanic undergraduate enrollment actually grew a little bit. It’s up 2%. So what we’re seeing with white students really stands out.

Jack Stripling That’s really interesting. Is this happening at all sorts of colleges?

Katie Mangan I think it’s happening across all colleges, and there’s certainly some exceptions. Some highly selective colleges have been able to dig deeper into their applicant pools. Their enrollment numbers might not necessarily show this, but that’s a very small slice of the pie. And this trend is generally happening across the board to all different kinds of institutions.

Jack Stripling So, Daarel, you mentioned that it seemed counterintuitive that the population that might be most affected by these enrollment declines was white students. That often, the instinct of journalists is to look at underrepresented populations that have historically had trouble accessing higher education. Were you at all concerned about what it would mean to write a story about the crisis of white enrollment or however you want to put it?

Daarel Burnette There is both a disincentive and an incentive to write about this. So the disincentive being that this is a talking point that could be used to inflame hysteria over how colleges are recruiting and retaining students of color. So this debate is very fraught and there are a lot of myths, codified language, stereotypes. There is just a lot of confusion over what is and is not happening on college campuses. And then I think the incentive is that I’m just so curious as to what is driving the hysteria around DEI, and once you understand what’s happening when it comes to enrollment, once you understand what’s happening on college campuses, etc., it gets us closer to that truth. It gets us closer to why there’s just so much anxiety over how colleges are going about recruiting and retaining students.

Jack Stripling Daarel, I want to drill down into a point you made. We’ve seen so much opposition to DEI in this country over the past couple of years. As you know, a lot of states have passed laws banning DEI programs. Donald Trump has effectively waged war on DEI during his second term. So are you saying that the decline in white students on college campuses may be, even subconsciously, driving some of that DEI opposition?

Daarel Burnette Yeah, like it’s I think I might have said this earlier on, but like there is a truism in Black history that typically whenever there’s this huge backlash in the white community, there is something unusual happening in their community that they’re looking for a scapegoat. It’s one thing to say, Oh, there are a handful of people who think DEI has gone too far. But it was in several states. And when these laws were passed, it was passed by a large majority of the legislature. So it’s clear that the general populace really does have anxiety about their relationship with their local college.

Jack Stripling And two things can be true at once, right? White enrollment can be falling, but Black students can still be underrepresented in college. Is that right?

Katie Mangan When you look at college enrollment for 18 to 22-year-olds, there’s still a larger percentage of the white population going to college than you see in some other groups. About 41 % of white people in that age range are enrolled in college, compared to 36 % of Black people and 33 % of Hispanics. And that’s just part of the story. Black and Hispanic students continue to have lower college graduation rates than white or Asian-American students.

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Jack Stripling So you have experts that have seen this but haven’t made a big show of it. You’re not seeing a lot of research papers out there about this. And some admissions officers are declining to return your calls. You don’t necessarily know that that means this is a potentially explosive issue to talk about. But you might theorize that. Did you start to think that, Katie?

Katie Mangan {snip} I came across a few possible explanations. One of them clearly is demographic. Birth rates among white women have been falling at faster rates than some other populations. There are just fewer white students graduating from high schools who are in the pipeline to go to college. But it was the severity and the duration of the decline was so great, it was clear that it was more than just demographics. I think another issue that some people brought up was, you know, the economy. Unemployment rates are really low now and it’s possible for students to get decent paying jobs with a high school degree in some parts of the country. Maybe students were just all going the trade route. You know, maybe they were just getting jobs out of high school that didn’t require a degree and deciding not to go into debt. So that was another thing that we looked at. Then there was just a whole public perception about college. And this was where it was really interesting. A year or so ago, The Chronicle did this public perception survey, and one of the things that we found that was kind of surprising, and at the time we weren’t quite sure what to do with it, was we found that the skepticism about the value of a college degree was much, much higher among white respondents than minority respondents. White respondents were much less likely to say that a college degree was important or crucial to getting a good job. So at the time we thought, wow, that’s interesting. But, you know, maybe that had something to do with that, that white people, for whatever reason, were just more skeptical about whether college was worth the time and effort.

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Jack Stripling So there are, you know, myriad factors and reasons as to why students across different demographics may or may not be coming to college. But one thing we do know is that right now, politically, there is a lot of hot rhetoric around colleges not being welcoming to conservative students. {snip}

Daarel Burnette This rhetoric has really ramped up in the last couple of years where you have politicians out there saying that college has been like seized by these administrators who are only trying to indoctrinate you with liberal ideas around race, sexuality and gender and making you feel guilty for being white, that you are somehow the oppressor, etc. And that has really sort of damaged or sullied the reputation of colleges.

Jack Stripling Katie, did you talk to any students who said they’d receive that political message and it factored into their decision not to go to college?

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Katie Mangan This is a white student, yeah. Morgonn McMichael was telling me that she served on the board of her sorority, and she got a lot of pushback because of some social media posts she had made that were favorable to Trump. She also wore a MAGA hat around, which didn’t go over well in the sorority, and she was asked to kind of tone down her MAGA advocacy because it wasn’t a good look for the sorority, she said. And she really took offense at that. She said, you know, my sisters were able to, you know, do all of the pro-Biden posts they wanted and there was no pushback. So that was one example. And then she ended up dropping out of Texas Tech, she says, just because she felt it wasn’t welcoming and she was beginning to wonder whether she really even needed a college degree to do what she was doing. And what she ended up doing was being kind of a social media influencer. She ended up working for Turning Point USA and going around and talking to young people about why college might not make sense for them, why she felt colleges really were woke, as the terminology goes.

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Jack Stripling Katie, we’ve talked a lot about race, but I’m curious how income might factor into this story. I think some people have a gut level perception that middle and upper income white families are still encouraging their children to go to college and that these enrollment declines might be more prevalent among lower income or rural students. What do we know about how income figures into this larger trend of white enrollment decline?

Katie Mangan Well, that’s another weird thing. There’s actually recent data to suggest the opposite of what you might think. We’re now seeing that fewer white undergraduates from more affluent neighborhoods have enrolled in college over the past six years, and that’s not true of lower income neighborhoods. Those white students are actually enrolling at slightly higher rates. {snip}

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