Institutional Research Confirms Freshman Class is Smallest in Years

Institutional Research Confirms Freshman Class is Smallest in Years

By Maggie Feinberg

Recently released Institutional Research data shows that the current first-year class has just 303 students, the smallest since 2003. For comparison, there were 350 first-years in 2023 and 394 in 2022.

Reed is not alone; there’s a decline in college enrollment across the country. Freshman enrollment is down 5% this year compared to last year at American colleges and universities, and 6.5% looking just at private non-profit four-year institutions, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. 

One cause of this nationwide decline is a decrease in birth rates, which is projected to impact the population of college-age students until 2037. Additionally, there’s growing doubt about whether a college education is worth it, given anxiety about debt and a strong labor market. The Supreme Court’s decision to end race-conscious admissions last year may also have impacted personal decisions. As many freshmen can attest, complications with the FAFSA were another major disruption this year (see coverage by The Hill and The New York Times, among others).

However, Reed’s admissions process certainly also played a role. This year, Reed accepted 2,321 out of 9,431 applicants (an acceptance rate of 25%), as compared to 2,728 of 10,045 last year (27%). The yield remained the same, though: 13% of accepted students ended up coming here in both 2023 and 2024. Did admissions simply admit too few students?

Milyon Trulove, Vice President and Dean of Admission & Financial Aid, says, “In recent years, our goal has been to project the numerical and financial impact of a three-year average to determine the size of the next incoming class. A three-year average helps us better manage the inherent variability that comes along with a comparatively small incoming class.” We can then, perhaps, expect larger classes over the next few years to balance out the size of this class.

Despite all these challenges, this year’s first-year class is also the most diverse in Reed history. This is especially striking given the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision last year ending the use of race as a factor in admissions, which led to the opposite trend at many other colleges. The first-year class, then, looks to be small but mighty.