2023-24 IPEDS 12-month Data

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I’ve covered the National Center for Education Statistic’s IPEDS data on distance education (i.e., online education) for the past dozen years, starting with this 2012 profile and continuing to the recent 2023 profile.¹

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.

Four 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 2023-24 academic year). Students working on flexible schedules that often 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 (2023-24).

For all of the following charts:

• Exclusive DE: # or % of students taking only online courses in 2023-24

• Some DE: # or % of students taking both online and face-to-face courses in 2023-24

• No DE: # or % of students taking only face-to-face courses in 2023-24

Looking further at the data:

• The percentage of students in online courses was nearly identical from 2022-23 to 2023-24 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.

• These numbers show higher online enrollments than the Fall 2023 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 Western Governors University (WGU) passed Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) with a significant lead as the largest US higher ed institution. WGU has 282 k total students compared to SNHU’s 255 k, compared to four years ago when WGU had 190 k students and SNHU 168 k. For exclusive DE students, WGU is first, followed by SNHU 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.

Remember, this 12-month data better captures fully-online program enrollments than the fall census. This chart gives a better visual view of the mix of DE types.

What if we did the same chart but segmented it by the Degree Level (undergrad vs grad)?

While master’s level online programs are the sweet spot for the Online Program Management (OPM) market, and more broadly for institutions using revenue as a primary driver for online expansion, this chart shows visually that the number of undergraduate fully-online students is far larger than for graduate students for large institutions. Graduate students are more likely to take exclusively online courses compared to undergraduate (43% vs. 28%, respectively) and pay higher tuition, but there are far fewer fully-online graduate students compared to undergraduate (1.8 m vs. 6.0 m).

And finally, here is a chart showing the changes from the 2019-20 to the 2023-24 academic years in terms of enrollments by DE type; bars showing total differences, labels as % change):

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1  Reminder: IPEDS reports distance education (DE), although that is mostly equivalent to online education, and I’ll use the terms interchangeably.