Free Republic

The White House on Wednesday touted the record-breaking numbers of people signing up for health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges, with almost a month left in open enrollment. More than 15 million people to date have signed up for health insurance, a 33 percent increase over the same point last year. The administration said it estimates more than 19 million people will have selected plans by the Jan. 16 deadline, an increase of 7 million compared to when President Biden took office.

Three years and counting since the pandemic shuttered schools and tethered students to their laptops, new data shows that enrollment in the vast majority of the nation’s largest school districts has yet to recover.Kindergarten counts continue to dwindle in many states — evidence of falling birth rates and an ever-growing array of options luring parents away from traditional public schools. Experts fear those trends, as well as a possible recession and the looming cut-off of federal relief funds, amount to a perfect storm for U.S. education.The $190 billion in pandemic aid that was provided to schools allowed many districts to...

Student enrollment is continuing to decline at the University System of Georgia. Overall enrollment for the spring semester at the system’s 26 institutions fell to 311,484, down 0.9% from last spring, Angela Bell, the system’s vice chancellor of research and policy analysis, told members of the Board of Regents Tuesday. The system’s enrollment grew steadily from 2014 through 2021, Bell said during the regents April meeting on the campus of the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. But enrollment has declined during the last couple of years to the point where it stands only about 500 students above 2019, she...

The effects of the COVID-related government shutdowns three years ago continue to reverberate. A new report from the Associated Press indicates that many American teens have become disillusioned with college and have opted to skip it in favor of going to trade school or working a job that does not require an undergraduate degree. Between 2019 and 2022, college enrollment in the U.S. fell 8%, and the decline in college enrollment since 2018 has been the steepest on record, the AP claimed. Though enrollment increased slightly from 2021 to 2022 after most schools returned to in-person classes, the numbers have...

A recent study from the National Student Clearinghouse revealed that undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, and this decline is even after the resumption of in-person classes.According to a study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce college dropouts, earn 75 percent less compared with those who get bachelor’s degrees.Experts fear that fewer college graduates could worsen labor shortages in sectors such as health care and information technology.There are many possible reasons for this decline in college enrollments.According to the most recent quarterly tally by the Federal Reserve, student loan borrowers in the United States...

It seemed only an anomaly – a dip in college attendance – which was easily attributable, thanks to the pandemic. But what was once a burp has become a trend and a worrying one at that for institutions of higher learning (Well, their cash flow, to be more precise.).The undergraduate college enrollment decline has accelerated since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public institutions — especially two-year colleges — experienced the steepest declines.International enrollment and transfer enrollment also saw sharp declines during the pandemic.The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that between fall 2019 and fall 2022:Note Reference[3]• Postsecondary institutions...

After a significant drop in student enrollment, officials from Washington's largest school district are floating the idea of shuttering some schools and cutting staff, the Seattle Times reported. School officials from Seattle Public Schools discussed the potential need to "consolidate into a system of well-resourced schools" because of significant budget shortfalls related to decreased student enrollment. The district's senior staff discussed how consolidating the district's 106 schools may provide students with improved access to specialized programs, social workers, specialists, counselors, and nurses. The district's interim deputy superintendent, Fred Podesta, argued that "consolidating into larger schools that have the resources they...

Washington state's biggest school district is considering shuttering some schools and laying off staff in the near future as enrollment rates continue to drop following the pandemic. Seattle Public Schools officials floated the idea of "consolidating" schools during a workshop reported on by The Seattle Times. Funding for most school districts is tied to the number of students, so declines in enrollment will likely contribute to budget shortfalls.

Over the first two school years under the COVID-19 pandemic, K–12 enrollment in public schools decreased dramatically—with losses concentrated among the youngest students—and the pandemic has had historically unprecedented effects on available learning opportunities. But we know little about where these students went and what learning environments they are experiencing. Understanding the diverse character of these effects has not been straightforward. The pandemic has complicated the comparability of many conventional education indicators and conventional data from administrators, and surveys on student experiences are often available only after long delays. KEY FINDINGS Over the first two school years under the pandemic,...

The number of people who signed up for health insurance through HealthCare.gov jumped by 40 percent compared to last year, President Biden said on Friday. “Right now, four out of five folks who sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act can get healthcare coverage for $10 a month or less. These lower rates were set to expire on Jan. 1 of this coming year, but instead we were able to extend them,” Biden said during remarks addressing business and labor leaders.

Public school enrollment has dropped nationally and locally in recent years, with the trend starting prior to the pandemic in many places, but certainly exacerbated by COVID-19...."COVID impacted everything, and that's probably where we saw our most significant drop, is about a 6% drop from the 19-20 to 20-21," said Buncombe County Schools (BCS) Superintendent Dr. Tony Baldwin. Dr. Baldwin attributes the drop in enrollment to the pandemic, which was a moment of reckoning for many families who decided to switch to homeschooling or other options, like online school, charter school or even private school. He added, the increasing availability...

Public school enrollment didn’t deepen during the last school year, new federal data shows, despite the waves of disruptions and closures caused by new variants and quarantine policies. But it also didn’t rebound after careening over a cliff at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic when K-12 schools shed more than 1 million students. “Compared with fall 2020, total public school enrollment in prekindergarten through grade 12 was unchanged in fall 2021, with 49.4 million students enrolled in fall 2020 and 49.5 million students in fall 2021,” says Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the research...

As schools reopen for the new year, the number of children enrolled in government schools is plummeting all across the United States amid an escalating exodus of families moving toward home education and private-school options. Government education officials are freaking out.

California public school enrollment has dropped for the fifth year in a row — a decline of more than 110,000 students... Some students entered private schools, which saw an increase in enrollment. Home schooling also increased

The unexpected drop in statewide school enrollment last year of 160,000 students may prove to be a blip, ready to rebound as the coronavirus recedes. Or that one-year 2.6% drop could be an oversize harbinger of what demographers are predicting will be a decade-long enrollment decline in California.

The number of students applying to attend one of the State University of New York’s 64 campuses plummeted by 20 percent this year amid the coronavirus pandemic, Chancellor James Malatras said. Malatras dropped the bombshell in an op-ed published on Empire Report New York. “This year at the largest system of public higher education in the country — the State University of New York — our applications are down approximately 20 percent, one of the largest annual decreases in the System’s 73-year history,” Malatras said. Students can apply to a number of colleges before deciding where to enroll. But the...

We hear about this surge in ObamaCare enrollments. The San Francisco Chronicle is even asserting that "the public embrace of the Affordable Care Act amounts to a stark rejection of administration and Republican policy". Maybe we can call it something like the revenge of the AHA. The editorial spends a lot of time bashing Trump but it does not say anything about the economic state of the people signing up. In other words, are these AHA policyholders going to pay their own premiums or will they be subsidized in some fashion? We don't know but the answer matters a lot....

The Trump administration has reportedly killed media ads designed to encourage people to enroll in insurance coverage through the federal Obamacare marketplace before next Tuesday's open-enrollment deadline. The former CEO of that marketplace, HealthCare.gov, called the move an "outrageous decision" to "sabotage open enrollment" in Obamacare. The White House also has ended other outreach efforts to spur sign-ups on the HealthCare.gov marketplace, according to Politico, which broke the story Thursday.

The congressional budget office has revised its Obamacare enrollment target for 2016 downward by a million people. This is the second such downgrade the CBO has issued in 2016. The Hill reports: About 12 million people are now expected to have ObamaCare coverage by the end of 2016, according to the nonpartisan budget office. Just three months ago, the office had predicted that 13 million people would have coverage.The latest enrollment estimate is an even steeper drop from the CBO’s estimates from 2015, which predicted 21 million people would have marketplace coverage by this time. The enrollment after the end...

University of Missouri, one of the original flashpoints of protests at colleges across the country, is reaping a bitter harvest this coming year as freshman enrollment and retention of existing students will be down by 1500, according to an email sent by the interim Chancellor Hank Foley. Foley replaced Chancellor R. Bowen Liftin who resigned under pressure from protestors. Not only is Freshman enrollment down 20%, but upper class students are leaving the school in droves. This has created a budget shortfall of $32 million. Columbia Tribune: “I am writing to you today to confirm that we project a very...