Catholic school enrollment has been declining in the US for the last six decades after peaking in the 1964-65 school year, a new report from the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) discovered.
Patrick Reilly, founder of the Cardinal Newman Society, recently wrote that the NCEA’s summary of Catholic education in the U.S. found just 1.7 million students enrolled in Catholic schools in 2025, down from the roughly 5.6 million students enrolled in the mid-1960s. Since last year, enrollment has declined 0.6%. Additionally, 63 schools closed or consolidated, but 24 new ones opened.
Reilly decried the loss in students, asking “What organization loses 70 percent of its clients over six decades and fails to reform?”
Reilly also criticized previous NCEA reports for portraying Catholic schools as stable after the decline seemed to have stopped in recent years, as enrollment dipped 0% in 2024 and even grew 0.3% in the 2022-2023 school year.
Much of the apparent crisis in Catholic education in recent years can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which Reilly said caused the closure of 209 schools and an enrollment decrease of 6.4%. Only about half of the students who dropped out returned in the 2021-22 school year.
“Nevertheless, pundits touted that year’s 3.8 percent growth as the first increase in Catholic school enrollment in more than two decades and the largest increase in more than 50 years,” Reilly wrote. “Never mind that the circumstances of a pandemic were quite unusual, and the 2021-22 increase was only a partial recovery from a devastating loss the prior year.”
Reilly also pointed out several key findings from the NCEA’s report, noting that the non-Catholic population of diocesan schools has tripled since 1970 while the number of Catholic students keeps declining.
Despite struggles at the national level, Catholic schools are doing well in certain areas, especially in the Southeast. A year ago, CatholicVote reported that Catholic school enrollment in Florida rose 9% in 10 years, and a school that shut down in 2009 successfully reopened.
An op-ed from The Hill at the time noted that the success of Catholic schools to Florida’s school choice program, which saw the percentage of students using school choice grants for Catholic schools go from 18% to 75% in a decade.
The Archdiocese of Atlanta, Georgia’s newspaper, the Georgia Bulletin, similarly reported that an independent Catholic college prep school in Athens is set to expand its academics to include seventh and eighth grades in the 2025-26 school year.
The Diocese of Charlotte’s diocesan newspaper, Catholic News Herald, reported at the beginning of the 2024-25 school year that it saw a record enrollment of more than 8,300 students in its diocesan schools. According to the report, the number is up 2% from the 2023-24 school year and up 18% in the past five years.