Las Vegas, by comparison, “is for all practical purposes an education desert.
By nature, our potential student base is going to be constrained,” said Jennifer Walsh, senior vice president and provost at Hawai‘i Pacific, whose full-time undergraduate enrollment fell by 25 percent in the five years through 2020-21 - the last period for which official figures are available. But with customers getting harder to find, more colleges and universities are going to where the students are: in fast-growing cities that don’t already have a big supply of higher education institutions, such as Phoenix, Austin and Las Vegas.
