The Students Who Aren’t Coming

This is the time of year when we start to hear from competitive colleges about how good their application pools were and how stellar their entering freshman classes will be in the fall. Colleges are boasting, as they did last year, about the qualities of their new classes. But when the final numbers are in for the year, in September, will it be the same (or worse) than last year, when community colleges and other institutions that serve large numbers of low-income and minority students had disappointing years? Data being released today by the nonprofit group YouthTruth suggest that it could be a tough year.