Education & Enrollment Trends

It would be difficult to describe Virginia’s demographic trends over the last few decades without using an adjective similar to disparate or unbalanced. Regional economic trends in Virginia have created a stark income gap and the largest differences in household incomes of any single state in the country. At the same time, many young adults moved away from southern and western Virginia for better opportunities elsewhere, and very few young adults moved to these regions to replace them.

On January 13th, the Demographics Research Group provided a presentation to the State Senate Finance & Appropriations Subcommittee for K-12 Education. In our presentation, we focused on the impact that births and private education will have on enrollment in 2020s. The following post is a summary of the trends included in that presentation.Before the pandemic […]

While COVID-19 has impacted and continues to impact communities worldwide, it is also changing, in perhaps sometimes positive ways, how we manage our daily lives. The pandemic has caused many of us to rely much more heavily on online services that allow us to work, shop and even have doctor’s appointments from home. It has […]

Even in non-pandemic times, K-12 schools tend to be under resourced, especially in low wealth areas, but now during the COVID-19 pandemic when government leaders face difficult decisions about how to allocate diminishing funds, K-12 education will face even greater budget constraints. While teachers’ salaries and funds for capital investment are critical, another equally important […]

As a result of COVID-19, higher education institutions across the U.S. had to quickly transition from in-person to online courses for the Spring 2020 semester. In Virginia, the number of students completing coursework entirely online jumped from 120,000 to over half a million in a matter of weeks. Colleges and universities are now preparing scenarios […]