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I’ve covered the National Center for Education Statistics’ IPEDS data on distance education (i.e., online education) for the past 13 years, starting with this Fall 2012 profile and continuing to the recent Fall 2024 profile.

IPEDS has been invaluable to researchers and analysts trying to understand these enrollment trends, but a well-known weakness is that the most-used data come from the Fall Enrollment survey, which takes a snapshot approach: How many students fall into each category as of the institution’s fall reporting date (typically October 15 or the institution’s official fall census date). This approach does not capture the increasingly important nature of multiple starts per year, shorter terms, and habits of part-time working-adult students.

Starting with the 2019–20 data, NCES added distance education classifications to its 12-month Enrollment survey which more accurately represents the enrollment patterns 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 this case, July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025). This better captures students working on flexible schedules that often don’t align with the October census date.

For all of the following charts:

Overall, total enrollments are accelerating, but it is also interesting that we have a remarkably stable mix of modalities for the post-pandemic years, with Exclusive DE around 30–31%, Some DE around 35%, and No DE around 34–35%.

The headline number shows accelerating growth for total enrollments, with 2024-25 data 3.7% higher than 2023-24 data, which was 2.9% higher than 2022-23. That growth rate, however, is expected to slow in 2025-26 based on separate National Student Clearinghouse data (to 1.5% growth).

You can see the full breakdown across modalities and adjusted sectors in the table below.

If we look at the top institutions by total enrollment, segmented by DE type, we see that Western Governors University (WGU) remains the largest US higher education institution, with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) now close behind. For the first time, WGU and SNHU both have more than 300,000 unduplicated headcount, which has not happened for a US institution since the University of Phoenix in the mid-2010s.

Let’s look further at the breakdown of top institutional enrollments ranked by Exclusive DE enrollment. This chart gives a better view of the mix of DE types—note how dominant the blue Exclusive DE contribution is for the largest institutions.

And finally, here is a chart tracking how the modality mix has shifted from the 2019-20 to the 2024-25 academic years, with each DE type — Exclusive, Some, and No DE — shown as a share of total enrollment by year.

The post-pandemic period appears to show a new status quo, stable for three measurement years, with roughly equal numbers of Some DE and No DE students, and a lower number of Exclusive DE students.

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