Undergraduate enrollment · 50 states, DC & Puerto Rico · 2004–2024

Enrollment by State

Where undergraduates are gaining and losing ground, public versus private nonprofit, one year at a time or across the last decade. Every change is measured on the colleges that existed in both years — closures count as losses, openings as gains, and campus mergers and reporting reshuffles don’t register as students coming or going.

This part of the project looks at larger demographic trends over time. While the distress index and the report card measure the health and strength of individual colleges, there are larger forces at play. Some private schools in the Northeast, like the Ivy League, still see high demand, but students are generally moving toward the South and West, with Texas, Utah, Georgia, and Arizona seeing big gains over the past 10 years. Those gains come mostly from public universities, as students have started to favor public institutions much more than their private counterparts.

By state

United States

Enrollment index, 2004 = 100 PublicPrivateTotalU.S. total
Year-over-year change, public vs private

Every state

Click a row or a tile to open it above.

How change is measured

A state’s undergraduate count sounds simple to compare across years. It isn’t, because colleges keep changing how they report — and naively those reshuffles show up as enormous swings.

Each year is a link between two adjacent years, measured only on colleges whose level, control and state are the same in both. A college in the earlier year only is a closure (a loss); one in the later year only is an opening or a merger’s successor (a gain). So a merger nets to about zero while real closures still show — West Virginia’s private sector losing a third of its students in 2012 is Mountain State University losing its accreditation.

The 10-year comparison chains the ten annual links from 2014 to 2024, so it always agrees with the year-by-year view. Student counts for the decade are the 2014 enrollment times that chained change.

Colleges are grouped by their federal aid ID (OPEID), so campuses that share one move together, as market.py does for the two-endpoint view.

  • Reporting repairs. A year missing between two reported ones, or a year a college reorganized its reporting units and its total lands more than 15% off the line between its neighbours, is replaced by that line. Examples: Penn State’s missing fall 2022, and ASU reporting only two of its campuses in 2013. Single-year spikes above both neighbours are also smoothed. Genuine one-year drops are left alone.
  • Online. “In-person” removes institutions where most undergraduates study exclusively online (SNHU, WGU, Liberty’s online arm and similar) — the same definition as the other two pages. Left in, Southern New Hampshire alone turns a shrinking New Hampshire into one of the fastest-growing states in the country.
  • Universe. Fall undergraduate headcount (full- and part-time) at public and private nonprofit colleges; for-profits are excluded. “Four-year” is the default; “All” adds the community colleges that carry much of public enrollment.
  • Headcounts vs. changes. The student counts shown are everyone enrolled that fall at colleges classified four-year that year, which includes community colleges that have since added a bachelor’s program — Texas’s four-year public headcount roughly doubles from 2014 to 2024 for that reason alone. The percentage changes leave each reclassification out of the year it happens, so Texas’s decade reads +14%, not +99%. Switch to All, incl. 2-year for totals the label can’t move.
  • 2024 online status is judged from 2019 and 2022–23, the latest non-pandemic distance-education years NCES has published.