California’s fall 2021 undergraduate enrollment dropped by nearly a quarter-million students since pre-pandemic fall 2019, according to a survey released Thursday. The overall one-year enrollment drop is less than the decline of 148,113 in fall 2020 when students were online. Nationally, enrollment dropped from fall 2020 to fall 2021 by 3.1% — a loss of 465,300 students, bringing the combined enrollment losses since fall 2019 to more than 1 million. In California, enrollment at public four-year universities dropped by 2.9% from fall 2020, better than in 25 other states. Gavin Newsom’s budget addressed the difficulty by proposing $150 million to build on a previous $120-million investment in community colleges’ enrollment and recruitment efforts.

Source: Los Angeles Times January 14, 2022 15:00 UTC