Survey: 46 Percent of Private Schools See Enrollment Rise

When COVID-19 looked like it might devastate American private schooling, Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom began tracking the sector’s health, cataloging schools going out of business and enrollment trends. While private school enrollment shrank in the early part of the pandemic, as COVID-19 went on we started seeing evidence that private schooling was rebounding, likely because private schools had gotten back into full academic operation faster than public schools, including reopening to in‐​person instruction.

Our fourth annual private school survey looks at enrollment trends between the 2022–23 and 2023–24 school years. For deeper enrollment knowledge, we asked schools if they had increasing applications, if they had more applicants than seats available, and when they reopened for in‐​person education (if they ever closed) during the pandemic.

Our latest data, derived from a survey sent electronically to all schools in the Private School Review database that serve at least one grade in the K–12 span, indicate that private education is continuing to grow, as it has in all but our first survey. As shown in Figure 1, among the 462 schools that responded to our question about the direction of their enrollment, 46 percent reported increases between the end of the 2022–23 school year and the start of the 2023–24 school year, 30 percent had no change, and 25 percent reported declining enrollment. (Totals may exceed 100 percent due to rounding.)

The mean change in enrollment was a gain of five students, which with a most recent mean enrollment in US private schools of 184 students is a 2.7 percent increase. Figure 2 shows the distribution of gains and losses, with 68 percent falling between a loss of 15 students and a gain of 20.

Half of private schools reported receiving more applications for admission than the prior year, 35 percent reported no change, and 15 percent received fewer applications this year, as shown in Figure 3. However, not all schools could accommodate the increased demand for private education. Figure 4 shows 42 percent of schools had more students apply than seats available.

The trends in our first four surveys indicate what has also been reported elsewhere: after taking a big hit at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, private schooling staged a rebound and has been growing, while traditional public schooling has been contracting. Figure 5 shows the trend for general movement: enrollment increasing, decreasing, or remaining unchanged. In our first survey, which came out in September 2020 and looks at enrollment changes between the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years, losers were much more prevalent than gainers—57 percent to 24 percent, respectively. The mean enrollment change (Figure 6) was a loss of 14 students. However, each subsequent year saw gainers outpace losers—and mean enrollment numbers increase and wipe out the first year’s loss—for a four‐​year mean gain of 13 students, or a 7.2 percent net increase from the 2019 national average enrollment of 180. Note, though, that our first two years of data had small samples and, hence, high margins of error. In the first two years, we also separately accounted for enrollment with pre‑K and without. In the most recent two years, we did not separate pre‑K from K–12. The numbers in Figure 5 for 2019–20 to 2020–21 and 2020–21 to 2021–22 are for schools with pre‑K and include those pre‑K numbers.

Private schools reopened for in‐​person instruction much sooner than public schools during COVID-19. The pandemic lockdowns of many populations started in the spring of 2020. As shown in Figure 7, 1 in 5 private schools (18 percent) either never closed or reopened in spring 2020, and 70 percent reopened to in‐​person education in fall 2020. In sum, 88 percent of private schools reopened to in‐​person instruction by fall 2020. In contrast, it was not until about April 2021 that half of public school students were receiving traditional instruction.

Private schooling enrollment continues to grow, though that growth has slowed in the past couple of years. As we get further from the time when public schools were largely closed to in‐​person education—the last school year with heavy closures was 2021–22—the pandemic seems likely to be less of an explanation for growth, and non‐​COVID‐​19 factors seem more likely to be in play. Perhaps especially, “culture war” battles that have engulfed many states and school districts might be fueling new interest in educational freedom. Pandemic frustrations and those conflicts also seem to have driven large expansions of school choice programs that make paying for private school more equitable and increased private enrollment more likely. Whatever the reasons, these findings indicate a continuing movement away from public schooling that could accelerate if existing private schools create new seats or new schools come into operation.

We used the Private School Review database of institutions and contact information with a goal of coming as close as possible to reaching the entire population of private schools. We began with a list of 27,741 schools with at least one grade in the K–12 span. We sent notifications to each of the schools on the list one week prior to entering the field, letting them know about the survey. We then sent an invitation to participate in the survey to the first email address we had for each school. Of those, 2,018 bounced or failed to deliver, and 133 were duplicates. The email was successfully sent to 25,616 unique addresses. We sent two reminder emails to the schools and collected data from November 22 to December 4. We had 489 schools respond to at least some portion of the survey, giving us a response rate of 1.8 percent. There were 462 institutions that provided data for the primary variable of interest: whether enrollment had increased, decreased, or stayed the same. Many Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod schools responded to the survey at the request of a national organization. We thus weighted responses on shares reporting enrollment gains and losses, mean enrollment change, increased or decreased applications, and reopening dates to provide nationally representative results. Different variables reported here had slightly different numbers responding, but all fell within a +/− 5 percentage point margin of error at the 95 percent confidence interval.

The first concern is that schools that did or did not respond might have differed in ways correlated with enrollment, skewing our results. If, for instance, schools likely to have shrinking enrollment were less likely to answer our survey, our results would overstate increasing enrollment. Also, the Private School Review contact list no doubt is missing some schools. If those were more or less likely than institutions on the list to have increasing or declining enrollment, it would bias our results. Missing existing schools could be especially important with the surge in the growth of microschools, which are very small and might not be known to Private School Review. On the negative enrollment side, respondents almost certainly exclude closures, though we received emails from a few people letting us know their schools had closed. That would miss major enrollment losers. We also did not include schools without electronic contact available—email or telephone—which exist but likely serve communities, such as the Amish, that would tend to only have changing enrollment as a result of fluctuating numbers of school‐​age children, as opposed to parents sending children to different schools.

We have an indication that our sample is roughly representative of the country. Weighted state shares of schools in our sample and of private schools nationally are roughly the same. As of 2021, for instance, California accounted for about 11 percent of private schools while accounting for 10 percent of our sample. Florida accounted for nearly 9 percent of all private schools and 6 percent of our sample. Texas had 6 percent of all private schools and 8 percent of our sample.

Further bolstering confidence in our finding of increasing enrollment, Cato’s tracking of private school openings and closures—a project that compiles reports of permanently closing private schools and new private schools—shows a net gain of private schools between August 1, 2022, and July 31, 2023, supporting a likelihood that losses from closed schools not captured in our data collection do not outweigh gains in new schools not captured in the enrollment data. It is additional evidence that private schooling is expanding. That said, the data on our tracker of new school openings and existing school closings is derived only from media reports, so it also might miss many openings and closings.

Kayla Susalla contributed to this report. Any questions can be sent to Neal McCluskey, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom.