An error in the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s projection of the number of first-year students starting college last fall caused the organization to report incorrectly that freshman enrollment last year had dropped when in fact it had increasedye7, its director said in a statement this week.

By mistakenly mislabeling a number of first-year college students as high school students taking college or university courses, the center said it underestimated the true number of incoming college students. That led it to erroneously project the largest drop in freshman enrollment since 2020 in a report it published in October.

The acknowledgment on Monday amounted to a reversal of the report’s top-line findings. Those conclusions fed into anxieties in higher education about long-term challenges, including a coming “demographic cliff” caused by a drop in births during the Great Recession and more general doubt about the value of a college degree.

The report was based on preliminary enrollment data that the research center gathered from slightly more than half of all U.S. colleges and universities. After catching its error, the center said it expected to show that enrollment had risen in a report next Thursday, which includes data from nearly all institutions of higher education.

It said that the error had affected previous reports as well, but that “the effect was magnified” last year because of an unusually large number of dual-enrolled high school students. That may have obscured the fact that the number was inflated even more by the center’s overcount.

“The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center acknowledges the importance and significance of its role in providing accurate and reliable research to the higher education community,” the center’s executive director, Doug Shapiro,x777 said in a statement. “We deeply regret this error and are conducting a thorough review to understand the root cause and implement measures to prevent such occurrences in the future.”

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