Jan. 7—GRAND FORKS — An “enrollment cliff” facing colleges and universities across the United States is set to spare North Dakota — for now, at least.
A report released late last year by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects a peak in the national number of high school graduates this year, followed by a steady decline through 2041.
North Dakota’s number of high school graduates, though, isn’t set to peak until 2034, and is one of a handful of states expected to see more high school graduates in 2041 than in 2025.
“There are a lot of places across the country that are looking at 2025 as this peak for your number of high school graduates where higher education needs to adjust things,” said Colleen Falkenstern, a senior research analyst with WICHE. “With North Dakota, you see you have more time for that.”
The “cliff” is a bit of a misnomer, as WICHE’s report notes. Most of the country can expect a steady decline in high school graduates beginning next year, for one simple reason: the birth rate has declined steadily since 2007, 18 years ago.
But North Dakota is one of 12 states, as well as Washington, D.C., that can expect to see its numbers continue to grow over the next several years.
That’s because of several mitigating factors, according to state demographer Nigel Haarstad.
For one, North Dakota experienced a significant influx of migrants during the previous decade, driven by the Bakken oil boom and statewide economic growth. Many of those migrants were of childbearing age, and went on to start families in the state.
North Dakota also consistently ranks highly in fertility rates, Haarstad noted in an email to the Herald, and had the fourth-highest fertility rate in the U.S. in 2022, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
WICHE’s projections generally gel with current class sizes in North Dakota’s public schools, said Jennifer Weber, director of institutional research for the North Dakota University System. (The WICHE projection also indirectly incorporates migration data by measuring how one cohort of students increases or decreases as they age.)
Graduation numbers aren’t the only thing that matter, though, Weber noted: the propensity of those high school graduates who go on to attend college is also important.
Nationwide factors like a bad economy can lead to college enrollment increases as people delay entering the workforce.
Weber says the Great Recession — which is often pegged as the initial cause for the national decline in birth rates — likely drove NDUS to its all-time enrollment high in 2011, even as the Bakken boom shielded North Dakota from the economic downturn affecting much of the country.
A more local factor Weber thinks affected college enrollment in North Dakota was the Legislature’s decision to begin offering scholarships for students at state colleges and universities in 2009.
Weber thinks the scholarships helped keep college students, including her two daughters, in-state even as state institutions saw declines in enrollment after 2011.
North Dakota’s graduation rates are projected to drop after 2034, and neighboring states like Minnesota will likely face enrollment declines much sooner.
That could affect some eastern colleges like North Dakota State University, where the student body has more Minnesotans than natives.
For the moment, though, Weber said, system administrators aren’t freaking out.
“We’re keeping our eye on it, we’re vigilant, but we don’t have any reason to have sirens going off at this time,” Weber said.
The state system has seen continued enrollment gains this year at almost every institution, warding off fears that schools like NDSU could lose students to Minnesota’s North Star scholarship program.
Weber said the state is also well-positioned as college increasingly moves online by merit of the University of North Dakota’s hybrid and remote offerings — more than half all UND students had a partially- or fully-online course load last year.