Scaremongers Take Note: Christian Higher Education Enrollment Recently Grew by 1.4%

Remember all of that negative press about Christian Higher Education (CHE) declining? (see my posts on this topic here, here, and here). The just-released IPEDs Fall 2023 enrollment numbers should hopefully put a rest to that story for at least a year. The good news is that even though higher education as a whole faces a looming demographic cliff (meaning the total number of American high school graduates will peak in 2025), CHE enrollment grew by 1.4% between Fall 2022 and Fall 2023.¹

Of course, not all groups of Christian institutions grew the same. Enrollment at Christian Historically Black  Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) declined by -5%. Catholic university enrollment was only slightly above the previous year (0.1%). Yet, all other Protestant sectors of CHE experienced over 1.7% enrollment growth with a couple of groups at or close to 5% growth (see Table 1 below).

Table 1

What is interesting about this year’s growth is that three-fourths of it occurred in undergraduate enrollment and only one-fourth in graduate programs. The looming demographic cliff was supposedly supposed to spur growth in graduate programs at the expense of undergraduate programs. So far that has not happened.

This enrollment growth also happened amid the announcement of eight different institutional CHE closures this past year. This reality shows that one should never equate institutional closures with enrollment decline. The journalistic habit of writing about institutional closures and then generalizing about Christian higher education from those closures is a problematic one. Of course, journalists, even Christian ones, rarely write about success stories. I would like to see some stories written about these institutions with the largest percentage growth this past year (Table 2) or the past four years (Table 3).

Table 2.  Highest Percentage Enrollment Growth from 2022 to 2023

Note:  All enrollment numbers are from IPEDs.

Table 3. Highest Percentage Enrollment Growth from 2019 to 2023

Note:  All enrollment numbers are from IPEDs.

What I also found interesting is that most of these growing institutions significantly operationalize their Christian identity (for more on the Glanzer OCIG score see here). For example, Simmons College of KY is the highest-scoring HBCU on my OCIG. That being said there were three exceptions (two MLPs and another HBCU).

Of course, in many of these cases of growth, there are also special circumstances at play. Warner Pacific is likely benefitting from the implosion of a nearby Christian university to its north. Central Methodist University has dramatically expanded its online offerings. I triple-checked McMurry’s numbers and wondered if the enrollment numbers were misreported to IPEDs they were so unusual. Yet, I learned their astounding growth trend has now continued into Fall 2024. Eastern University’s growth is largely in the graduate student sector where they are benefitting from a new pricing model and being in a large metro area. The Southern Nazarene University enrollment change is an especially positive success story in light of this past year’s announcement about the closure of Eastern Nazarene University.

As I have mentioned in my earlier posts on this subject, the reason for the eight announced CHE institutional closures this past year has to do with the Walmartization effect on CHE. In other words, economies of scale favor larger institutions. For example, although those eight closing institutions had an overall enrollment decline of -4676 between Fall 2022 and Fall 2023, each of the two largest Christian institutions grew more than that total enrollment decline last year: Grand Canyon University (+5747) and Liberty University (+6359).² You may not like Walmartization, but it is here to stay.

It would also appear that the future of Protestant higher education continues to be low-church. All but one of the largest ten Protestant universities have an Assemblies of God, Baptist, Churches of Christ, or Nondenominational identity. What is interesting in the Protestant examples is how they all operationalize their Christian identity (the Glanzer OCIG score) at significant levels (for more on the OCIG score see here). I should note that for many institutions such as Grand Canyon, Liberty, and Indiana Wesleyan, around 80% of their total enrollment is online.

The ten largest Catholic universities are all still largely residential. It will be interesting to see if an online version of Grand Canyon, Liberty, or Indiana Wesleyan eventually emerges from the Catholic ranks. As can be seen below, six of the ten largest were started by the Jesuits. Their OCIG scores are all generally lower than the Protestant institutions except for the University of Notre Dame, which operationalizes its Christian identity at a higher level than more than half the Protestant universities.

Overall, the two major current dangers facing CHE have less to do with enrollment numbers and more to do with other issues. The first danger has always been secularization or what I prefer to call unfaithfulness. I recently went through and checked my list of Mainline Protestant institutions and took over a dozen institutions off the list that have completely secularized in the past five years (most only scored a 1 or 2 on my original scale, so they were already close to full secularization). I will say more about that trend tomorrow.

The second major danger has to do with some CHE institutions’ unsustainable habit of increasing tuition discounting. One recent study of 341 private institutions reported that the 2022-23 discount rates were “the highest ever recorded.”  If your enrollment is below 1000 students and your tuition discounting is above the “56.2% average institutional tuition discount rate for first-year students,” you need to do some thinking about your approach and sustainability. Thus, we should not be surprised when some of these institutions close. These closures are a tragedy for the students, the employees, and their local communities but they are not surprising.

Furthermore, we should not use these isolated closures to forget the bigger picture and good news regarding enrollment in CHE. American CHE is still growing in this challenging environment.

1. For how I define and identify the 533 CHE institutions I use see my recently co-authored book, Christian Higher Education: An Empirical Guide. I should note that secularization and other factors have now shrunk the number of institutions in our Mainline Protestant section to 98.
2. It is also important to realize that such closures often improve the enrollment numbers of similar schools. For example, even though Nyack/Alliance University recently closed in 2023 other Chrisitan Missionary Alliance institutions saw their 2023 enrollment grow:  Toccoa Falls College (24%); Crown College (9%); Simpson University (4%).