By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Three minutes
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s (NSCRC) Current Term Enrollment Estimates (CTEE) report delivered good news
for the nation again when it announced that total enrollment is up 3.5% year-over-year. That represents about 15.3 million undergraduates. It’s the third straight spring with an increase, but the United States still isn’t back to spring 2020 (“pre-pandemic”)
levels of undergraduate enrollment. Spring 2025 is short of spring 2020 by about 2.4% or 378,000 students.
As has become the norm in these reports in recent years, the national growth has been spurred by community colleges and primarily associate’s granting bachelor’s institutions (PABs). These sectors grew a combined 5.4% this spring, or nearly 288,000 students
year-over-year. Enrollment in associate’s-granting programs is up 6.3% overall, and enrollment in public two-year institutions is about 31% of undergraduate enrollment. PABs comprise 6.5% of undergraduate enrollment.
Enrollment in bachelor’s-granting programs is up a mere 2.1% year-over-year, but public, private nonprofit, and private for-profit four-year institutions still represent over 60% of undergraduate enrollment.
The other big risers in this year’s report are certificate programs, which are up 4.8% year-over-year. Undergraduate certificate enrollment is up a whopping 20% over spring 2020 levels.
The CTEE report considers enrollment by race and ethnicity, but we need to take these figures with a grain of salt or, as the NSCRC notes more professionally, “results should be interpreted with caution.” This is because race and ethnicity reporting is
“an optional part of the enrollment reports it receives from institutions” and “there are between 11.3 and 14.8% of undergraduates reported with race/ethnicity of Missing, across years in this report.”
Those caveats made, Black undergraduates had a big increase in enrollment this spring (+10.3% year-over-year). Multiracial students also saw their enrollment increase by 8.5%. These are increase of 2% and 14.3%, respectively, relative to the pre-pandemic
spring 2020 semester.
In terms of other analyses by demographics, the CTEE report has an interactive Tableau dashboard that allows for selection by race/ethnicity, age, or gender; undergraduate or graduate award level; and sector. The National College Attainment Network (NCAN)
encourages members to engage with the NSCRC report to better understand the spring term enrollment outcomes of the students you serve. Unfortunately, there is no proxy for student income or first-generation status.
Beyond student demographics, the CTEE also considers institutional characteristics like sector and locale and has a specific breakout for HBCUs, or historically Black colleges and universities. Most notably it also looks at community colleges’ “program
focus” (broken out by high transfer, mixed transfer, and high vocation). This last group, “institutions with at least 53.8% of their awards were considered high career and technical program mix” are up 11.7% year-over-year and 19.4% relative to spring
2020. This, along with the finding about certificate enrollment, show students voting with their feet toward shorter-term programs that are more likely to be directly tied to a workforce pathway.
Beyond the national level, the CTEE allows states to look at year-over-year change in total, undergraduate, and graduate enrollment.
The spring CTEE report follows last fall’s, which showed that undergraduate enrollment for the Fall 2024 semester increased 4.7% over fall 2023, which was a surprising but welcome finding coming off the difficult 2024-25 FAFSA.
Per usual, the NSCRC remains an invaluable source of information on students’ postsecondary outcomes. The National Student Clearinghouse manages enrollment and completion data for upward of 98% of students enrolled in the United States and is the only
national source of this data. NCAN will continue to report on the NSCRC’s findings.
Have a question or want to dig in further on this data? I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at debaunb@ncan.org.
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