More Concerning News about Enrollment and Retention

Concern over CSU's enrollment situation continues to build, and for good reason. During the January 2026 CSU Faculty Senate meeting, CSU President Stuart Rayfield reported that CSU's Spring 2026 enrollment was up 2% in terms of headcount and 2.25% in terms of student credit hour production. One month later, during the February 2026 CSU Faculty Senate meeting, she revised her prior report to indicate that Spring 2026 enrollment is down 2.28% in student headcount and by 1.89% in student credit hour production. As Turner Business noted at the time, the updated enrollment numbers represent percentage point swings of −4.28 and −4.14, respectively, from last month's numbers. The bad news was solidified in her March 2026 Updates to faculty staff, wherein she stated, "Enrollment continues to trend slightly down overall; however, there are encouraging signs that we are beginning to move in the right direction. Among those are the increased and frequent interactions between students and their academic coaches, increased interest in last weekend’s Discovery Day and on-campus housing, and our modest increase in fall-to-spring student retention." In the past, future enrollment trends were predicted using current application numbers and other related metrics. Now, it appears that the number of current students' interactions with academic coaches is being used to predict decisions being made by prospective students, which seems a bit flimsy. Not only that, the reference to "our modest increase in fall-to-spring student retention" seems to suggest an increase of somewhere between 0% and 1%, when just a few weeks ago that change was measured as a 2% increase. Rayfield closed this portion of the Updates with, "I appreciate the intentional work happening in every unit across campus to strengthen recruitment, retention and student success. Please help us spread the word through your personal and online networks that undergraduate and graduate applications to CSU are free during the month of March. This is an excellent opportunity to remove barriers for prospective students, and your personal encouragement can make a meaningful difference." The USG's Spring 2026 enrollment reports should be released in the very near future. Turner Business will be posting information from those, so stay connected.