Modest Growth in Enrollment Rate for Low-Income HS Grads

The percentage of low-income students who pursue higher education within two years of high school graduation is trending ever so slightly upward, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, indicating a possible respite for colleges afraid of the so-called demographic cliff.

The Clearinghouse’s High School Benchmarks report, released this week, shows that the rate at which high school graduates go straight to college remained essentially steady from fall 2024 to 2025. But among low-income high schoolers, the percentage of graduates from the Class of 2023 who entered college within two years of finishing high school increased two percentage points compared to the Class of 2022. (The raw numbers also show an increase among high-income students, but the Clearinghouse noted that those gains were caused by federal changes to how income was classified.) The Clearinghouse uses percentage of students that receive free or reduced lunch in a given high school as a proxy for income level.

The increase is an encouraging sign. Many colleges are already struggling to maintain enrollment, and fear that the demographic cliff—the long-expected drop-off in the number of high school graduates—will lead to further declines. One possible strategy to offset those losses is to persuade high schoolers who may not have planned to go to college to enroll. That’s not always easy, especially at a time when many Americans don’t see the value of traditional higher education and interest in other educational paths, like short-term credentials, is on the rise.

But the numbers in the Clearinghouse report indicate that the percentage of high school graduates going on to enroll in college may be increasing. And significant room for growth remains; among the Class of 2023, only 60.4 percent of students at low-income schools enrolled in college within two years. If that share keeps increasing, even modestly, it could be a balm for institutions in areas where high school graduation rates are dipping.

College completion holds mostly steady: The report also includes information on completion, showing that the number of students who proceeded to finish their degree within six years of graduating high school declined from the Class of 2018 to 2019. But it’s less than a one-percentage-point decrease, which is low considering the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the freshman year of students who started college in fall 2019. And persistence from the first to second year of college remained steady or increased slightly for all high school graduates between 2022 and 2023, but increased 1.7 percentage points among those from high-poverty high schools.

In addition, the report highlights the educational plans of the high school Class of 2025 who are headed to college. Among both low- and high-income high schoolers, most chose majors within the umbrella of liberal arts and sciences, followed closely by business and management majors. Engineering was slightly more popular among higher-income students (cited by 8.8 percent) than low income (6.9 percent).

That gap appears to persist throughout students’ years in college; among 2019 high school graduates, high-income students were significantly more likely to graduate with a STEM degree (17.1 percent) compared to low-income students (8.7 percent). Within that STEM-degree cohort, low-income students were more likely to have earned their degrees in psychology or the social sciences, while high-income students were more likely to have studied engineering.