SUNY enrollment dips amid COVID, continuing a downward trend

ALBANY, N.Y. » Enrollment at SUNY’s 64 campuses fell nearly 6% for this fall semester compared to last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing a downward trend of enrollment at New York public colleges over the past decade, new figures showed.

SUNY enrollment is now down 16% over the past decade — and a whopping 30% at community colleges. Overall, SUNY enrollment was at about 394,500 this fall, a drop of nearly 24,000 students since last year and almost 77,000 since 2010, according to the data released by SUNY officials at its Board of Trustees meeting this week.

Still, SUNY officials said the decline this semester is actually less than they expected as they feared the coronavirus would keep more students from enrolling in classes, whether inperson or online. The majority of students are online only this fall, the data showed.

“Overall, our preliminary enrollment picture is quite a bit more favorable than we anticipated in March and even what we were predicting in the summer,” SUNY Provost Tod Laursen told the board Tuesday.

SUNY has bolstered its COVID testing protocols after an outbreak quickly shuttered SUNY Oneonta on Sept. 3.

SUNY campuses reported testing 73,755 students and staff since college resumed and 0.9% have tested positive, with 1,150 students in mandatory quarantine as of Thursday.

“As the largest public system of higher education in the country, we have a tremendous responsibility to keep students, faculty, and staff safe across 64 campuses, and ongoing, aggressive testing is one of our strategies for doing so,” SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras said in a statement Wednesday.