The U.S. Education Department (ED) recently released new data on full-year enrollments and credentials awarded by postsecondary institutions. This DataPoints examines the trends in these data for community colleges starting with the first year of the Covid pandemic.
Public community college enrollment in fall 2019 was nearly 7.2 million students; two years later, enrollment dropped by more than one million students, to 6.1 million students. Enrollment was up to 6.4 million in the latest data available for fall 2023.
ED also reports an unduplicated headcount of students during an academic year. Many students who enroll in community colleges are not enrolled in the fall term; therefore, a full-year headcount provides a better accounting of the number of students served in a given year. In the 2019-20 academic year (AY), 10.14 million students enrolled in community colleges. This number likely would have been higher as the pandemic may have affected summer enrollment in 2020. (For reference, the prior AY full-year enrollment was 10.57 million students.)
Coming soon: A companion Datapoints on AACC’s analysis of trends of awarded community college credentials
Full-year enrollment dropped by more than 1.5 million students between AY 2019-20 and AY 2021-22, to 9.02 million students. However, full-year enrollment did not increase as fast as fall enrollment over the next two years, only increasing by 168,000 students. Fall enrollment accounted for the largest percentage of the full-year enrollment in the 2019-20 academic year. This likely reflects the pandemic’s impact on summer 2020 enrollment. (The prior year’s fall enrollment was only 68.2% of full-year enrollment.)
Dual enrollment’s big role in overall enrollment
One important population in community colleges are students enrolled in classes while still attending high school. For the second year, the department reports the number of students in full-year enrollment who are still enrolled in high school, also known as dual-enrolled students. The percentage of the full-year enrollment that is dual-enrolled rose from 20.4% to 22.1% from AY 2022-23 to AY 2023-24. In fact, the increase in dual-enrolled students (179,651) was larger than the overall enrollment increase (140,150). In other words, without dual-enrolled students, the full-year enrollment would have decreased.
ED’s National Center for Education Statistics has also been collecting data on the number of students who are enrolled exclusively in distance education, are taking some distance education classes or are not taking any distance education classes (see graph, below). Not surprisingly, exclusive distance education enrolment spiked in the 2020-21 academic year, as many colleges offered few on-premise classes in summer 2020, and did not return to more normal course offerings until spring or 2021 or later.
