Public School Student Disenrollment: Causes, Effects, and Potential Solutions

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

For decades, policymakers across the U.S. have grappled with dwindling student enrollments because of declining birth rates. These long-term demographic shifts have direct negative consequences for school districts: schools are under capacity, resulting in inefficient operations, diseconomies of scale, and, potentially, politically controversial school closures.

Enrollment pressures have increased considerably following COVID-19. Some families, dissatisfied with how leaders handled school re-opening during the pandemic, opted out of the public school system, pursued private schools, microschools, and homeschooling. Alternatives have been supported by the concurrent expansion of school choice programs (i.e., universal private school voucher programs or education saving accounts) and virtual schools. Federal policy decisions and political discourse has further affected the school attendance of certain student subgroups–specifically, immigrant and immigrant-origin youth, which had been among the fastest growing population of school-aged youth for decades. 

Broadly, enrollment pressures may play out dissimilarly for families of different backgrounds. In response to efforts to expand access to seats in “elite” high schools and gifted programs, those with relatively greater racial and socioeconomic privilege (and access to private alternatives) threaten to disenroll from public schools altogether. In contrast, disadvantaged families increasingly pursue homeschooling and virtual options, though the consequences of these choices are unclear. Public school disenrollment may thus worsen existing inequalities.

Given its policy-relevance–and the potential deleterious effects on school operations and students–the four papers of this panel focus on the causes, effects, and potential solutions for disenrollment. 

The first paper documents substantial and persistent shifts away from public schools in Oregon since 2020 using unique linked data to decompose these shifts across the family income distribution. The authors provide preliminary insight into the long-run consequences of public school disenrollment by documenting changes in high school completion and college-going. How will the move away from public school impact existing disparities in educational attainment by family income?

The second paper uses publicly available data on districts across the U.S. to investigate the extent that enrollment declines observed in the most recent academic year (2025-26) reflect responses by immigrant-connected families to intensified federal immigration enforcement.  

The third paper analyzes a decade of student-level administrative data from NYC Public Schools to explore patterns of exit across public, charter, and homeschool sectors, and to investigate the characteristics of schools (e.g., behavioral challenges, academic quality, changing choice sets) that experienced the greatest enrollment losses over time.

The last paper evaluates the impact of perceived “elite/academically rigorous” high school programs on school enrollment and potential unintended consequences. Using a newly created dataset on International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme high schools in California, the authors, with difference-in-differences, analyze enrollment overall and by subgroup, school segregation, and family investment in public schools.

Together, these studies provide a holistic overview of student disenrollment by rigorously analyzing a combination of public and restricted-use administrative data nationwide and at the local level. This panel will be of interest to scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and address disenrollment and its potential harmful downstream effects on schools and student equity.

Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• Zhizhou(Arthas) Chen, University of Texas at Austin

Discussants

• Adam Kho, University of Kentucky

• Joshua Goodman, Boston University

Organizer

• Mark Junxuan Chin, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Opt-out or Dropout? Pandemic-era Public School Enrollment by Family Income - Presenting Author: Leah Ruth Clark, U.S. Census Bureau; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Christopher Cleveland, Brown University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Thurston Domina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Paul Hanselman; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Andrew Penner, University of California, Irvine; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Winnie Yee, University of California Irvine; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Quentin Brummet, NORC at the University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Paul Youngmin Yoo, Stanford University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Emily K Penner, University of California, Irvine

• Missing Students: English Learner Enrollment Shortfalls in 2025-26 - Presenting Author: Andrew Mitchell Camp, Brown University

• Post-Pandemic (Dis)enrollment in New York City’s Choice-based School System - Non-Presenting Co-Author: Jo R. King, Boston University; Presenting Author: Berta Bartoli, New York University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Jerray Chang, Boston University

• The Impact of International Baccalaureate Schools on District Student Enrollment, Racial Composition, and Public School Finance - Presenting Author: Mark Junxuan Chin, Vanderbilt University