2022-23 IPEDS 12-month Data

Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Sign up, and get your own copy of the news that matters sent to your inbox every week. Sign up for the On EdTech newsletter. Interested in additional analysis? Try with our 30-day free trial and Upgrade to the On EdTech+ newsletter.

I’ve covered the National Center for Education Statistic’s IPEDS data on distance education (i.e., online education) for the past 12 years, starting with this 2012 profile and continuing to the recent 2022 profile and analysis. *

IPEDS has been invaluable to researchers and analysts trying to understand these enrollment trends, but a well-known weakness is that the data come from the Fall Enrollment survey, which takes a census approach. How many students of each category as of the October census date (the 15th for most schools). This approach does not capture the increasingly important nature of multiple starts per year, shorter terms, and habits of part-time working-adult students. Students who take online courses in the winter, spring, or summer, but not in the fall, just don’t get counted, as the data approach originated with the assumptions of traditional start in the fall with a semester or quarter system programs.

Three years ago NCES added distance education classifications to their 12-month Enrollment survey which more accurately represents the true nature of online courses and programs. The basis of the survey is a count of how many unduplicated students fit within each category over a 12-month period, from July 1 through June 30 (in the current case from the 2022-23 academic year). Students working on flexible schedules that just don’t align with the October census dates.

This year gives us the chance to compare the final pre-pandemic numbers (2019-20) with the fully post-pandemic (2022-23).

For all of the following charts:

• Exclusive DE: # or % of students taking only online courses in 2022-23

• Some DE: # or % of students taking both online and face-to-face courses in 2022-23

• No DE: # or % of students taking only face-to-face courses in 2022-23

Looking further at the data:

• The percentage of students in online courses actually dropped from 2021-22 to 2022-23 academic years. Overall, 31% of students in this period took only online courses, and a further 35% took a mix of online and face-to-face courses, totaling 66% of students taking at least some online courses (compared to 70% the year before).

• These numbers show higher online enrollments than the Fall 2022 data that showed 54% of students taking at least some online courses.

If we look at the top institutions by total enrollment, segmented by DE type, we see that Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) has further cemented its lead over Western Governors University (WGU) as the largest US higher ed institution. SNHU has 251 thousand total students compared to WGU’s 237 thousand, compared to three years ago when WGU had 190 thousand students and SNHU 168 thousand. For exclusive DE students, SNHU is first, closely followed by WGU and then the former largest institution, the University of Phoenix, then Grand Canyon University, and Liberty University.

Let’s look further at the breakdown of top institutional enrollment by DE type, by degree type, and the three-year changes.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.