A new report from the Council on Graduate Schools offers a look at enrollments in graduate schools in the United States. At the onset of the global pandemic in 2020, enrollments in undergraduate colleges and universities and most notably enrollments in two-year colleges dropped. But graduate enrollments increased by 2.5 percent from 2019 to 2020.
Now, the drop in higher education enrollments has spread to the graduate level. Applications for admission to U.S. graduate schools rose by nearly 4 percent between Fall 2021 and Fall 2022, demonstrating college graduates’ continued demand for advanced training. However, domestic first-time graduate enrollment declined by 4.7 percent between Fall 2021 and Fall 2022.
A total of 508,646 graduate students enrolled for the first time in graduate certificate, education specialist, master’s, or research doctoral programs in Fall 2022. Women saw a 5.6 percent decline, compared to 3.5 percent for men. Women were 58 percent of all first-time enrollments in 2022.
In Fall 2022, more than half of first-time graduate students at the master’s degree and certificate level (58 percent) and at the doctoral level (56.3 percent) were women. Women constituted substantial majorities of first-time graduate enrollment in public administration and services (79.6 percent), health sciences (79.5 percent), education (77.7 percent), and social and behavioral sciences (66.1 percent). In contrast, women were only 29 percent of first-time graduate students in engineering and 34 percent in mathematics and computer science.
More than one-half (58.2 percent) of total enrollments in graduate programs in Fall 2022 were women, compared to 41.8 percent who were men. Among graduate students in Fall 2022, men were more likely to be enrolled full-time than women.