Plunge Seen in Applicants for College

For years, New York City colleges have been awash in a record number of applicants, but beginning in 2009 they will have to contend with a shrinking pool from which to choose their freshman classes, a new report warns.

Education and demographic experts say the shift could harm private schools financially and force public schools to lower admissions standards.

By 2015, the number of high school graduates in New York State is expected to decline by 14.5%, and many private colleges are already attempting to compensate for the shrinking application pool by recruiting more international students and looking to high school graduates in the South and West to fill their freshman classes.

A drop in local college applicants is likely to hit public institutions, which enroll only 13% of New York's out-of-state student population, the hardest.

"We're beyond the baby boom, we're beyond the baby bust, and now we have the baby bust echo effect," the director of Cornell University's program on applied demographics, Warren Brown, said. "These things are like ripples." Kindergarten enrollment in New York State has dropped by more than 14% since peaking in 1995, and that decline is expected to hit colleges and universities in two years. If colleges don't begin recruiting students from new markets, they can expect a 10% decline in the number of applications they receive by 2014.

A smaller pool of applicants could force private schools to provide more financial aid packages to remain competitive, and public schools to lower their admissions standards, Mr. Brown said.

"The publics will be challenged and have to confront the whole issue of remedial education and devote some resources to that," Mr. Brown said. Top-tier schools will continue to attract top students, but "down the pecking order, schools have to be concerned and potentially develop new markets and applications."

A report by the state's Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities is warning public and private schools to begin preparing now for the drop in applications.

"Higher education is one of the major export industries for New York's economy now," the president of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, Abraham Lackman, said. "More schools are starting to set up campuses and having sharing back and forth with other countries — that's the wave of the future. It's a positive thing for the economy to bring out of state and foreign students into New York."

For schools with small profit margins, a smaller applicant pool is a looming concern.

"For almost every university president, the most anxious moment is to figure out how many students are coming in the fall," the president of the New School, Bob Kerrey, said in an interview. "There's a fear that at some point, there's a limit to what you can put on student debt. Most of us that aren't in the top tier have a concern about that."

The New School is looking to recruit more foreign students to its Greenwich Village campus, Mr. Kerrey said. The university, which has a campus in Paris, is also looking to open satellite sites in Bejing and Mumbai, and is more actively recruiting in the South and the West.

Pace University is also recruiting abroad and in other states to a much greater extent than it did in the past, university officials said. New York University, a school closely linked to the city, is also boosting its international profile. The school most recently announced plans to open a campus in Abu Dhabi.

Officials at the City University of New York downplayed predictions of a drop in in-state applications.

"Why should planners assume that colleges and universities in New York City have to begin now to prepare for a drop in applications in 2009?" a vice chancellor at CUNY, Jay Hershenson, said in an e-mail message. The percentage of high school graduates seeking a college degree is increasing, even if the number of high school students overall is on the decline, he said.

CUNY has also expanded its College Now program, which encourages high school students to pursue college degrees. It now includes 280 public high schools serving more than 40,000 students. The city is also projecting an influx of 1 million new residents by 2030, which means the face of college applicants could become more diverse.

"The changing composition of high school graduates down the road is going to be dramatically different," Mr. Brown said. The proportion of non-hispanic white students is rapidly decreasing.

Researchers of college admissions trends also said the number of students applying to schools nationwide is on the rise, with no signs of slowing down.

"We do not agree that there will be significantly fewer students applying to colleges in 2009," a senior editor of the Princeton Review, Adrinda Kelly, said in an e-mail message. She said the demographics of college-bound students are simply changing as more minorities and children of undocumented workers apply to college.