At Washington universities, enrollment questions persist

Last year, Eastern Washington University unveiled plans to revamp campus housing.

One residence hall, Morrison, was set to be torn down last summer, however demolition hasn’t yet happened and university police have used it for active-shooter training. Another, Dryden, is slated for demolition this winter. There are plans to erect new buildings once they are demolished.

Another building, Brewster Hall, is privately owned and had been leased by the university until several years ago, according to EWU spokesman Dave Meany.

The empty dorms are a symptom of the recent drop in undergraduate enrollment that the school is trying to reverse.

Projections aren’t positive: According to the university’s analysis, student enrollment in the next 10 years is on a downward trend. At Eastern, enrollment is projected to decrease to below pandemic levels in the next decade.

A similar pattern is reflected across the state – a 2023 report from the Washington Student Achievement Council found that post-high school enrollment fell by 25% at community and technical colleges between the pandemic-affected years 2019 and 2022. Enrollment at four-year universities fell by 10% in those same years.

This isn’t true for every university – for example, the WSU Insider reported that the incoming first-year students would be the largest class at the university since 2019 – a 6.5% increase in enrollments systemwide. The University of Oregon, the Register-Guard reported, saw its freshman enrollment record broken for a second year in a row, with a 16% increase in students in 2023 compared with 2021.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that in 28 states, enrollment at flagship universities – the most prominent university in a state – has risen, while enrollment at smaller, regional universities has dropped.

The root of these trends? According to Michael Meotti – the executive director at the Washington Student Achievement Council, a state agency that works to enable Washington students to attend college – is simple: Fewer kids are going to college.

The reasons are more complex.

Universities, Meotti says, reflect regions.

Jens Larson, the Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management at Eastern Washington University, cites an example of this trend. Eastern Washington has some of the state’s lowest-income ZIP codes, and the university serves the greatest percentage of low-income students, he said.

If an area has a low number of college attendees, then the regional university will, generally, have low enrollment numbers.

Meanwhile, Meotti said, “(For) the universities that are in more demand across a wider swath of the state of the country, the pressures on them are not so great,” because they don’t necessarily cater to one region.

Another key factor to consider is the ongoing impact of the pandemic.

Universities don’t know what the lingering effects of COVID disruptions are, Meotti said, but they do know that its impact goes beyond 11th and 12th grades.

“If you had a disruptive middle school,” he said, “that may push more vulnerable students off the pathway of thinking about college.”

This year’s incoming high school seniors would have experienced COVID shutdowns in middle school – so the impact of COVID on university enrollment, according to Meotti, is still tangible.

And as a whole, Meotti said, students and families are questioning the value of higher education.

Larson points to Washington’s absentee numbers – with rates of chronic absenteeism in students rising nationally, Larson is concerned students are missing “critical support.” In Spokane Public Schools, the rate of chronically absent students doubled between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 school years, according to previous Spokesman-Review reporting.

“If students aren’t attending as regularly or fewer of them are in public schools, that means that there are fewer students completing these steps,” he said.

The Community Colleges of Spokane is not facing the same difficulties. Its enrollment in the schools’ Associate of Computer Science program increased by 174% in the years between 2020 and 2023.

Spokane Falls Community College Vice President of Student Affairs Patrick McEachern said in a written statement, “SFCC enrollment rose, year over year,” and that it was “reasonable to conclude that the growth is due to retention efforts in the guided pathways implementations.”

Community Colleges offers shorter, more cost-effective technical and vocational training. When compared with the cost of a four-year university, this training may seem like a smarter path.

Many families, Meotti said, question whether college is as financially valuable as it once was, especially when compounded with this year’s delays in federal student aid distribution.

These delays, according to Larson, caused, “work that we normally would do in six months to be done in six weeks.

“I would not hope for a repeat,” he said.

Student aid is an issue the WSAC and Meotti are working to address directly. Beyond championing the College Bound Scholarship program and the soon-to-launch Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or SNAP, program (which would enable underserved students to know their tuition at Washington universities as early as 10th grade), Washington has extremely generous state financial aid.

Larson points to Washington’s Guaranteed Admissions Program, which lets students know as high school juniors that, if they have met certain criteria, they will have guaranteed admission to five state universities.

“Washington’s enrollment – the trend line is a little bit down right now,” Meotti said, “but in many parts of the country, the trend line is way down.”

Despite the multifaceted reasons for a drop in college enrollments, one fact remains sure – universities will need to change.

“I think, sometimes, people forget higher education is very much a market,” Meotti said.

Students get to decide where they go, and a university needs to appeal to students on their terms.

Larson points to Eastern’s student outreach, estimating the school has increased its presence at community events by 400%.

Higher education, Larson said, “Is changing so quickly right now that it’s an uncertain time for a lot of institutions.

“The decisions that we and students make today really impact communities decades from now.”

Editor’s note: This story was changed July 15, 2024, to more accurately reflect the status of EWU’s dormitories.