College enrollment numbers rebounded to prepandemic levels in the fall, according to a final estimate published Thursday.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center counted 19.4 million students enrolled across all higher education sectors in 2025. That’s up 1% from both fall 2024 and the last prepandemic headcount in 2019.
Community colleges led the way, adding 3% more students last fall.
The Virginia nonprofit also tracked a rare split between 1.4% fewer students enrolled at private four-year colleges and 1.2% more students in public four-year schools.
“Overall enrollment is up slightly, but the real story is the shift between sectors,” said Matthew Holsapple, senior director of research at the clearinghouse. “Community colleges and public universities are gaining ground, while private colleges are down — a clear departure from the broad-based growth of recent years.”
According to the clearinghouse, private and public colleges have traditionally moved in tandem, with enrollment changes staying within half a percentage point of each other.
The report found that undergraduate certificate and associate degree programs grew by 1.9% and 2.2% in the fall semester compared with 0.9% growth in bachelor’s programs.
Two-year institutions grew for the fourth straight year, offsetting a 5.9% decline in international students that reversed years of steady increases.
Community colleges enrolled 752,000 students in undergraduate certificate programs last fall. That’s up 28.3% from the fall of 2021.
Some academic insiders reached for comment blamed rising living costs for driving more students into cheaper public schools and two-year programs.
“Public colleges have always been cheaper, but when people view times as tough, they’re more sensitive to prices,” said Dick Startz, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “People are clearly more worried right now about all sorts of spending.”
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania, called the numbers “a warning bell” for private campuses.
“Those of us who work at private schools need to make a much better case for what we do,” Mr. Zimmerman said in an email. “And that starts with improving our teaching, which remains uneven at best. If we’re not attending carefully to the students in our classrooms, why should they pay to be here?”
The clearinghouse bases its enrollment counts on direct reports from the nation’s roughly 6,000 colleges and universities.
According to Thursday’s report, the 19.4 million students enrolled in the fall remained short of a record-high 20.1 million who studied in the fall of 2011.
Higher education leaders have braced for what some call a demographic cliff this spring as a years-long decline in U.S. births since 2008 drives a 15% drop in potential college applicants.
The nonprofit Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education has projected that U.S. high school graduation numbers will decline steadily from a record 3.9 million students in 2025 to under 3.4 million in 2041.
That’s an abrupt turnaround from decades of growth that fueled college expansions.
“The four-year degrees and private institutions are leaning over the cliff,” said Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University. “The schools have taken the opportunity to load up on students one last time this year, but I don’t see any bright future for higher education.”
