Frequently Asked Questions

How should I cite this edition of Knocking?

Suggested Citation: Lane, P., Falkenstern, C., & Bransberger, P. (2024). Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates. Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. https://www.wiche.edu/knocking.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

What is the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE)?

Visit our About page. p.s. WICHE is pronounced “wit-chee.”

How long has Knocking been published?

The first edition was published in 1979. Originally called High School Graduate Projections by State, it was known as Knocking at the College Door starting in 1998. Editions were released in 1979, 1984, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Visit our publications archives to access past editions. Knocking is currently produced every four years by WICHE and funded by sponsors.  

Why every four years?

Publishing every four years provides enough time and data to determine any significant changes in trends from the previous Knocking predictions, while simultaneously allowing WICHE to provide timely information to decision-makers.

Who uses this analysis?

Knocking at the College Door provides trusted and reliable data that education leaders, researchers, education and policy groups, and economic development experts use to inform research and policy directions. The projections help key leaders plan for and confront emerging challenges related to demographic changes in their states. For example:  

• Elected officials and policymakers use the data to better understand future populations of students, both in size and composition, so that they can make informed, data-driven policy decisions. This analysis helps inform state and local talent development strategies, such as examining possible approaches to increase the number of engineers and IT professionals in Idaho.  

• School districts and K-12 leaders rely on the Knocking projections to better understand the likely enrollment trends across their plan for enrollment changes systems in the coming decades so they canand  make informed, data-driven policy decisions. This can help ensure the necessary school infrastructure and appropriate allocation of resources.  

• College leaders use the projections to better serve the likely pool of high school graduates in their states and regions. It also allows college presidents, chief academic officers, and student affairs leaders to make informed decisions about where to invest to offset forthcoming declines in the number of high school graduates, as there will still be plenty of potential students, but they may differ from previous populations.  

• Researchers and education policy groups use the data to help explore future research and policy directions and support the development of new tools that put its data to use. The National College Access Network’s FAFSA tracker, as one example, uses Knocking data in its calculations. That tool became essential for understanding annual college access trends during the challenges associated with the recent FAFSA rollout. 

• Economic development experts can use the data to understand future workforce trends and help shape policy to ensure that people are equipped with the necessary skills to move the economy forward.

What makes this report series unique from other high school graduation data research?

Simply put, no other comparable resources are being published that provide these data at the national and state levels. While the U.S. Department of Education previously published a similar resource (though without the level of detail or state-level disaggregations by race and ethnicity), that work has been discontinued. Knocking is the only source of national and state projections of future high school graduates that include race and ethnicity disaggregations. Additionally, this edition includes projections based on whether high schools are located in urban or rural settings.  

How are the data collected?

WICHE relies on four main sources of data to produce Knocking:

• WICHE requests and collects data directly from states on the number of high school graduates because the federal government has not published this information since 2012.
• Data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) for public school enrollments.
• The Private School Universe Survey (PSS), a biannual survey conducted in odd years by NCES.
• Annual births data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

Visit the Data page to learn more.

How does WICHE produce projections?

Visit the Methodology and Technical Appendix pages to learn more.  

How accurate are the projections?  

While small differences between the actual numbers and projections are expected, there is a high degree of accuracy in the initial years after publication. WICHE periodically compares the Knocking at the College Door projections to other data about high school graduates to better gauge their accuracy in real-time and over past editions. Analysis of past projections provides WICHE with greater confidence in its predictions of overall numbers as well as trends. On average, WICHE’s projections of the total number of public high school graduates in the United States from previous editions of Knocking at the College Door are within about 3% of the actual numbers subsequently reported to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) for specific years within the first five years of the projections. The best way to understand the potential accuracy of the projections is to recognize that the modeling methodology would project future graduate numbers exactly if the underlying trends continued precisely as they have for the past five years. That is, if progression and retention, graduation rates, mortality, and migration, as well as other factors that may influence the number of students in a given grade, did not fluctuate, the projections would be exactly right. Because there are always changes in these factors, the projections inevitably deviate slightly from actual numbers.