Southern New Hampshire University’s online programs have become so successful that they account for two-thirds of all college and university enrollment in New Hampshire, and appear to be the reason we’re the only state in the Northeast that is seeing increases in post-secondary enrollment.
That’s the conclusion from two sets of data released within the past week about post-secondary enrollment.
The first was released Monday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. It showed that the number of students enrolled in colleges and university courses in New Hampshire has risen 6% in the past two years, even as it has fallen almost 3% nationally and by more than that in neighboring states.
In Vermont, college enrollment has fallen almost 5% in the past two years; in Maine, more than 3%; and even Massachusetts, filled with some of the world’s most prestigious schools, has seen post-secondary enrollment fall almost 4% since 2017.
New Hampshire’s enrollment spurt comes as a surprise since officials have for years been highlighting a decline in the number of high schoolers throughout the region – public school enrollment in grades 9-12 has fallen by 15% in New Hampshire since 2008 – with a resulting decline in incoming college freshmen. That decline was cited as part of the decision to lay off faculty and staff at NHTI in Concord, for example, and we’re not alone. In Vermont it has been cited as the root cause for the closure of three small private colleges in the past two years.
So where are all those new college students?
The National Student Clearinghouse won’t say because they don’t release data about individual schools.
“This is a snapshot of the total headcounts as of fall 2019 by state,” said Mykyung Ryu, a researcher for the non-profit.
Ryu said the group receives enrollment data directly from about 3,600 degree-granting colleges and universities in the country, which she said were 97% of the nation’s total post-secondary schools. The ratio is the same in New Hampshire, which implies that all but one school sent in 2019 data.
But it’s not hard to guess why New Hampshire’s higher-education enrollment is so different than surrounding states with similar demographics: SNHU in Manchester.
The school once known as New Hampshire College has taken the idea of online classes, which it started as long ago as 1995, and turned it into a juggernaut. How big a juggernaut became obvious this week from an analysis of federal data about online education by Inside Higher Education, a trade journal for colleges.
It found that SNHU’s online enrollment grew 15% between 2017 and 2018, and by a staggering 73% over a three-year period.
In 2018, the magazine said, SNHU has 96,912 students enrolled entirely online, more than any school in the country except Western Governors University in Salt Lake City, which has done a similar job of turning a good regional in-person reputation into a national online powerhouse. Utah is the only state where enrollment grew by a larger percentage than in New Hampshire last year.
SNHU even has more students now than Phoenix University, which for many years was the public face of online education until it was hit by concerns about the financial model of for-profit universities, compared to non-profits like SNHU.
Compared to traditional school counterparts, SNHU is in a different league. It had more students online than were enrolled in all of Vermont’s colleges and universities combined, or in all of Maine’s. In fact, it almost had more than all Vermont and Maine colleges and universities together.
As for New Hampshire, all the state’s colleges – from UNH and Dartmouth to tiny Thomas More College – had about 159,000 college and university students in 2018. In other words, almost exactly two-thirds of all enrolled post-secondary students in New Hampshire were in SNHU online courses.
No wonder every college in the state and the country is scrambling to expand its online offerings.
What this means for the future effect of higher education in New Hampshire is up in the air. A thousand students taking online courses from their homes or businesses scattered around the region has a very different effect on the community than a thousand students living in dorms or rented rooms in a town.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
