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Employment and unemployment rates, much more than the number of high school graduates or other population trends — which are important over time but very slow moving — are the biggest factors driving enrollment for community colleges, for-profit colleges and some open-access four-year institutions.
Selective public and private colleges can control the size of their incoming classes by tinkering with admission criteria, and they tend to draw students whose decision is not whether to attend college but where. But community colleges accept anyone with a high school diploma who wants to enroll, and the size of that potential market varies depending on what the alternatives are.
For low-income students, especially at colleges where tuition is low and often covered by financial aid, the biggest cost of college is the opportunity cost — the money a student could have earned by working instead of going to school.
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