SPOKANE — Last year, Eastern Washington University unveiled plans to revamp campus housing.
One residence hall, Morrison, was demolished last summer; another, Dryden, is slated for the same fate this winter. Both will soon have newer buildings in their footprints. Even then, one of the newest halls, Brewster, has been unused for several years, according to the school.
The empty dorms are a symptom of the recent drop in undergraduate enrollment.
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 percent at community and technical colleges between the pandemic-affected years 2019 and 2022. Enrollment at four-year universities fell by 10 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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 said, 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 percent 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.
