A growing number of Americans are opting to skip college in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report.
Nationwide, transfer enrollment from two-year colleges to four-year institutions, or undergraduate college enrollment, dropped nearly 8 percent in the fall of 2022 compared to 2020, according to data from the educational nonprofit, National Student Clearinghouse (NSC).
Those declines continued even after the return to in-person classes that were put on hold during the peak of the pandemic, albeit at a slower pace than the previous year, according to the report.
Referred to by NSC as “upward transfers,” undergraduate college enrollment accounted for the “majority of fall 2022’s transfer enrollment losses and deteriorated during the pandemic for students at all income levels,” the report found….