Enrollment at the three state universities has been holding steady recently, but there are some challenges ahead.
Regents associate academic officer Jason Pontius says enrollment remains down from the record peak in the fall of 2016. “Forty percent of that drop over that time are from Chinese national students who are choosing not to attend our universities,” he says. “And another factor that is influencing that is nationally, there’s been about a seven to ten percentage point drop in the percent of high school graduates that are choosing to go to college.”
He says there has been some recovery of the international students. “That recovery is not coming from Chinese students. It is actually coming, in part, from students from India that are increasingly attending our universities,” Pontius says. The enrollment at Iowa State, the University of Iowa and Northern Iowa is about 81 percent undergraduate students, and around 59 percent of those students are Iowa residents.
Read more at Radio Iowa.
