Enrollment in New York City public schools has taken a nosedive , dropping by nearly 22,000 students last year alone — in the steepest drop since the COVID pandemic, according to a new report.

The sobering study, released Thursday by City Comptroller Mark Levine, shows the number of Big Apple K-12 students plummeted by a whopping 19% — or nearly 187,000 students — since the 2013-14 school year.

Total enrollment is projected to decline by another 128,000 over the next decade amid a decline in birthrates, the analysis noted.

The Big Apple's sky-high cost of living has also been a major factor in the decline, Levine emphasized.

"Declining school enrollment is not only a challenge for our education system – it raises fundamental questions about affordability, the ability of young families to build a future in New York and the kind of city we want to be,” Levine said.

At the same time, the city Department of Education spends $44,000 per student — more than any large school district in the country — despite mediocre to poor results on standardized math and reading tests.

Only half of public school students in 3rd-8th grade scored proficient on the most recent state English Language Arts/reading exam, a drop of six points. Forty three percent flunked the standardized math exam while just 57% scored proficient.

Even with the early childhood education expansion in pre-K and 3-K, total enrollment cratered, resulting in 147,930 fewer students between 2013-14 to last year, the comptroller's office noted.

Over that period, enrollment in 3K and Pre-K increased by nearly 40,000 students, to 94,726 in the 2025-26 school year.

Overall enrollment, however, has sunk from more than 1 million students to under 885,000 students.

There are 219 schools with fewer than 200 students, and many can't even field a sports team or offer advanced placement courses, Levine has said.

Levine's report did not issue recommendations, but in September he issued a statement saying the situation was "not sustainable."

"As painful as it is, there is going to have to be some consolidation of schools with sharply declining enrollment," he said at the time.

The report also shows that even the significant increase in charter school growth seen in the prior two decades has waned — in part because of a state cap that blocks more of them from opening due to opposition from the teachers' union and allies in the legislature.

During the expansion of charter schools over the past quarter century, many parents opted to enroll their students in the publicly-funded, mostly non-union, privately managed alternatives to traditional public schools. The increase in independently run charters came at the expense of the NYCPS.