ALBANY — The pandemic and the state’s free tuition program for public universities are creating tall challenges for New York’s private colleges.

The private colleges have been on a downward enrollment trajectory, similar to the path of schools in other states.

Nationally, preliminary data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows enrollment for all colleges has fallen by 6.5% since 2019.

Commenting on the overall trends in both the public and private sectors, Doug Shapiro, director of the research center, said: “Far from filling the hole of last year’s enrollment declines, we are still digging it deeper.”

The latest data, Shapiro said, suggests that “a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to see significant nationwide declines in undergraduate students, and community colleges remain the most adversely affected sector, experiencing a 14.1% total enrollment decline since fall 2019.”

At New York’s private colleges — which account for about 40% of the state’s total college enrollment — there are early indications for the fall 2021 semester that the enrollment decline appears to be “stabilizing,” said Emily Morgese, vice president of operations at the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities in New York.

The commission represents 109 member colleges, accounting for 99% of New York’s private college enrollment.

In the decade leading up to the pandemic, from 2009 through 2019, Morgese said, “Enrollment was declining a bit — pretty slowly — but it was declining. So over that period of time, we saw an aggregate 2% decline in our sector.”

But the public health crisis that began in March 2020 ushered in a steeper drop. Enrollment fell by 4% in the fall 2020 semester from a year before.

“It was most acute for first-time students,” Morgese said. “So you think about those students who decided to wait a year before they started their freshman year or had some kind of a medical or financial reason that made them delay starting their freshman years.”

Adding to the challenges for the colleges have been the widely-documented population loss in upstate New York and corresponding drop in enrollment at many public school districts in the state.

That demographic shift has had a heavier impact on the colleges that get a significant portion of their admissions from within the state than for colleges that draw students from other states.

The commission has been surveying its members for updated data for enrollment figures as of September and fresh figures are expected to be available soon.

As of September 2020, the aggregate enrollment at New York’s private colleges stood at 481,621 students. One year earlier, the enrollment tally was 502,488 students.

“The trends we saw in New York mirrored national trends,” she said, though New York’s demographic shifts were a key factor in the pre-pandemic decline.

The colleges have been taking varying approaches to attracting more students, with the common denominator being that they have become more creative in reaching out to prospective students who would consider those campuses if additional financial aid was available, Morgese said.

The state’s Tuition Assistance Program, which is available to all financially-qualified college students, has become an important resource helping students get to the campuses of their choice and complete their college education, she said.

However, New York’s free-tuition program, known as Excelsior, is reserved for the state’s public college students, leaving an uneven playing field for the private colleges competing for the same pool of potential enrollees.

“If you’re mainly recruiting from within the state, you saw a decline as a result of the Excelsior program,” she said of the private colleges. She noted Excelsior was the first state tuition program that excluded the private colleges.

The Excelsior program was announced by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo the year before the 2018 statewide election. Cuomo campaigned heavily on the “free tuition” theme, billing it as one his major accomplishments.

According to the latest tally from the National Student Clearinghouse, an estimated 17.5 million undergraduates are now enrolled in the nation’s colleges. College enrollment peaked nationally in 2010.

Over the past decade, the total enrollment at the 64-campus State University of New York had declined by nearly 20%, a troubling trend that gained steam amid the public health crisis.

With enrollment in decline, the most recent state budget provided SUNY with $11.9 billion, a $725 million increase from the prior year, funding 46,836 positions.