The COVID-19 pandemic outbreaks forced families to decide the safest and most effective learning environments for their children because of the virus's threat to health and life. Hence, because of the nationwide school closure, policymakers have raised concerns about the missing children cases-those who have not enrolled in school at all because…

In September, President Biden declared that "the pandemic is over," but parents with school-age children will not soon forget the struggles of the prior two years. Starting in March 2020, nearly all school buildings nationwide closed and remained shuttered for the rest of that school year. These closures upended families' routines,…

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports on the shifting transfer landscape during COVID-19 in a rapid response report series titled "COVID-19 Transfer Mobility, and Progress." Commissioned by the Research Center, this special journalist's report offers insights into how some colleges were able to grow their transfer…

Schools are facing a growing number of disaffected parents. To win them back, says one policy analyst, educators need to take their concerns to heart. After two-and-a-half pandemic years, writes policy analyst Robert Pondiscio, public schools are facing a growing number of disaffected parents--a trend reflected in declining enrollments. Pondiscio…

Homeschooling is generally understood to mean that a child's education takes place exclusively at home--but homeschooling is a continuum, not an all-or-nothing choice. In a sense, everyone is "home-schooled," and the ways that families combine learning at home with attending school are many. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the…

The 2022 National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) data provide a window into how the landscape of American education has shifted over the past two years in response to COVID-19-related school disruption. Between 2020 and 2022--a period marred not only by the health and safety worries that COVID brought but also by the heated debates about…

The objective of the report was to determine whether the University of Cincinnati used the Student Aid (Assistance Listing Number (ALN) 84.425E) and Institutional (ALN 84.425F) portions of its Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) funds for allowable and intended purposes. It also reviews the University's cash management practices and the…

Weak labor markets typically lead young workers to invest in skills. High unemployment during COVID diverged from prior downturns: enrollment at community colleges dropped by 9.5 percent between 2019 and 2020, with the drop larger among men. COVID disruptions generated supply-side impacts on courses of study requiring significant capital and…

When it comes to understanding what happened in the 2020-21 school year, the relatively new COVID-19 School Data Hub is an easy to use tool, and one of the few school closure trackers with information at the school, rather than the school district level. The COVID-19 School Data Hub can be used to understand how the pandemic influenced learning…

Research has found that fall 2020 school district reopening decisions appear to be driven more by politics and teachers unions than by the local presence of COVID-19. But what are the implications of those decisions for enrollment trends? Using recently released enrollment data from the state of Wisconsin, this study goes further to show whether…

Before the 2020-21 school year, educators, policymakers, and parents confronted the stark and uncertain trade-offs implied by the health, educational, and economic consequences of offering instruction remotely, in person, or through a hybrid of the two. Most public schools in the U.S. chose remote-only instruction and enrollment fell dramatically…

In October 2019, New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) called together a group of economists and higher education leaders for a meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to discuss the future of higher education ("Preparing for Another Recession?"). No one suspected that just months later, a global pandemic would turn the…

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a severe economic recession in 2020. Historically, during economic recessions, there have been large declines in independent (private) school enrollments in the United States. Thus, it would be expected that the American independent school sector would have experienced significant enrollment declines between fall 2019…

Charter schools have continued to draw an increasingly larger share of the students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), such that as of October 2021, 23.6% (n=77,662) of the District's students attended a charter school (Urdegar, 2021). This growth can be accounted for by examining changes to the proportion of the students enrolled at…

Charter schools are public schools governed by an independent board of directors that come into existence through a contract with an authorized public chartering agency. This report, known as the Illinois Charter School Biennial Report, provides legislators, policymakers, educators, and the general public with information regarding the state of…