Public community college enrollment increased by 1.4% between fall 2023 and 2024, based on an American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) analysis of newly released data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Private, not-for-profit four-year colleges saw a larger increase with 2.3% more students in fall 2024, while public four-year colleges saw the largest percentage increase — 6.1%. Public community colleges remain the largest sector of higher education, however, in fall 2024, public four-year colleges approached parity with public community colleges in terms of enrollment — 6,259,838 students in public four-year colleges compared to 6,438,743 students in public community colleges.
As shown in the figure below, enrollment trends varied by sector from fall 2020 to fall 2024. Public community colleges had their lowest enrollment in 2021, while most of the other sectors had their lowest enrollment a year later, in fall 2022. One exception to post-Covid dip in enrollment was non-degree-granting colleges, which had increasing enrollments each of the years measured.
Public community college enrollment
Since 2021 represented the low point in public community college enrollments, further analysis was conducted to see what changed between fall 2021 and 2024. The data in the first figure below represent the distribution of enrollment in fall 2024. The second figure shows the percentage change in each of the groups between fall 2021 and fall 2024.
In fall 2024, White students were 40% of all students enrolled — that population decreased by 4.6% between 2021 and 2024. Hispanic enrollment increased by 17.4% over that same period, representing nearly 30% of all students in fall 2024. During this four-year time, Black enrollment (up 12.2%), Asian Pacific Islander enrollment (up 7.2%) and students identifying as more than one race (up 15.3%) increased faster than the total enrollment.
Returning credential-seeking students comprised nearly half of all students, with 30.7% of all students being continuing students enrolled part-time and another 17.1% full-time. However, the total number of returning students decreased between 2021 and 2024; full-time decreased by 6.0% and part-time by 5.2%. The second-largest group of students in fall 2024 (25.5%) was part-time, non-degree-seeking students. This group increased by 28.3% between 2021 and 2024, reflecting the rapid growth in dual enrollment in community colleges.
New part-time and full-time students to community colleges (either transfers or first-time in college students) were nearly a quarter of all students in 2024. The rate of increase for the new part-time students (up by 15.9%) was above that for all students (up 6.2%).
