EFA enrollment for this fall in line with Josiah Bartlett Center estimates

New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program hit its enrollment cap of 10,000 students for the upcoming school year, the Children’s Scholarship Fund-NH confirmed this week.

As talk of the program growing beyond expectations spread through social media, readers of this website shouldn’t have been surprised by the numbers.

They’re almost exactly what we predicted five months ago.

The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy’s March paper with analyst Marty Lueken of EdChoice estimated that lifting the EFA income cap would bring 4,792 newly eligible students into the program.

How many new students have actually enrolled?

After high school graduations this year, 5,541 students remained in the program, according to the Children’s Scholarship Fund-NH, the EFA administrator.

If we include the 295 students on the waiting list, EFA enrollment increased from June-August by 4,754 students.

Our estimate of newly eligible enrollees was just 38 students higher.

The numbers aren’t fully broken down yet. So we don’t know how many of those students would have been eligible under the income cap, or how many came from district public schools. We also don’t know how many EFA students from the 2024-25 school year left the program in late June and July, after the 228 seniors graduated.

But even as we wait for that level of detail to emerge, the big picture is perfectly clear. Total growth in enrollment by August was close to the number we predicted just for newly eligible students (those above 350% of the federal poverty level).

That means that instead of enrollment far exceeding expectations, it’s actually come in a bit lower so far.

Unless you were using really bad estimates, that is.

For example, Reaching Higher NH projected that total expansion would immediately spike EFA enrollment to 20,125. (That would include every private school student in New Hampshire, even the 4,990 who live out of state and aren’t eligible for an EFA.)

Our estimates were a wee bit high, by about two classrooms’ worth of students. Theirs were off by nearly the enrollment of the entire Nashua School District.

Juuuust a bit outside, as Bob Uecker would say.

Now, projecting how people will react to public policy changes is never easy. It’s even trickier when you’re projecting hard numbers. What you strive to do is accurately account for as many variables as you can to make as realistic an estimate as possible.

Such calculations won’t always lead to the bulls eye. But if you do them right they’ll get you on the target.

As these things go, our estimates for new EFA enrollment from expansion in the first year were about as good as you can get. Getting that close won’t always happen. But this is a strong validation of the data and methodology we and EdChoice used to estimate the response families would have to EFA expansion.

This kind of work requires a lot of careful research, and that isn’t free. If you’d like to help us continue to provide the highest-quality analysis to policymakers, please take a moment to support our work here.