With the release of the Fall 2021 enrollment data from the US Department of Education’s IPEDS system, I had planned a post showing a comparison of three commonly-used data sources to help provide context, but as I looked further there seems to be a significant discrepancy between the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) enrollment reports and the official IPEDS data release. The NSC data show larger enrollment declines for all but one year in the past decade (2020), leading to an estimate of a 12.0% decline (2.4 million) from Fall 2012 – 2020, when the IPEDS fall numbers show an 8.0% decline (1.7 million) in that time period.
