Women’s Enrollments in Graduate School Held Steady After the Onset of the Pandemic

A new report from the Council on Graduate Schools offers a look at enrollments in graduate schools in the United States after the onset of the global pandemic. While enrollments in undergraduate colleges and universities and most notably enrollments in two-year colleges dropped after the onset of the pandemic, graduate enrollments increased by 2.5 percent from 2019 to 2020.

The report shows that in 2020, there were 303,146 women students enrolled in graduate schools for the first time. They made up 60.8 percent of all first-time graduate students at U.S. universities. In 2019, women were 59.3 percent of all first-time graduate school enrollees. Women were 55.4 percent of all first-time enrollees in doctoral programs at universities with a very high level of research, up from 53.3 percent in 2019.

If we break down the data by broad academic field, we find that women made up 79.5 percent of all first-time graduate students in public administration, 79.3 percent of all first-time graduate students in the health sciences, and 76.8 percent of the first-time graduate students in education.

But women were only 29.3 percent of all first-time graduate students in engineering and 44.3 percent in the physical sciences. These enrollment levels were all up slightly from a year earlier. Women were 33.6 percent of all first-time graduate students in mathematics and computer science, down from 34.6 percent in 2019.

If we look at total enrollments in U.S. graduate schools, we find that in 2020, there were 1,021,366 women enrolled in graduate school down from 1,052,785 women students in 2019. Women made up 59.7 percent of all enrollments in 2019.

In 2020, women made up less than 40 percent of all graduate student enrollments in engineering, mathematics and computer science, and physical sciences. Women were more than 75 percent of all graduate students in education, the health sciences, and public administration.

Of all women graduate students, 54.9 percent were enrolled on a full-time basis. For men, the figure was 59.2 percent. Only 35.8 percent of women enrolled in graduate programs in education were enrolled full-time.

The full report, Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 2010 to 2020, may be downloaded by clicking here.