Empty Desks: School Enrollment Trends Across Inner Core Communities

The first two installments in this Empty Desks series focused on the City of Boston, with one analyzing The Enrollment Crisis in Boston Public Schools and the other detailing The Growing Mismatch Between City and School Demographics in Boston. This third and final research brief zooms out to see whether the enrollment patterns we saw in Boston are playing out similarly across Inner Core Communities (as defined by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council).

Based on our read of the recent data, the results are somewhat mixed. Whereas Boston’s school-aged population has declined over the past decade, school-aged populations are up slightly regionwide since 2014 (+6.5 percent if excluding Boston and +0.6 if including Boston).¹ And there’s significant variation by type of community. At the same time, K-2 enrollment is down considerably across most of the inner core, suggesting enrollment declines in the coming years.

A confluence of factors from declining birthrates to rising housing costs to shifting immigration patterns contribute to these trends. So, let’s start this analysis by looking first at the current relationship between typical incomes in each city or town with its school-aged population. What we find is a rough U-shaped pattern, where both lower- and higher-income communities tend to have higher school-aged population shares and more middle-income communities tend to have lower.