Graduate school first-time enrollment has gone up between Fall 2020 and Fall 2021, according to a new report.
Dr. Enyu Zhou
The Graduate Enrollment and Degrees (GE&D) report – released by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) – showed that, between Fall 2020 to Fall 2021, first-time enrollment rose by 8.9%.
According to the report, first-time enrollment in this context refers to the number of students enrolled for the first time in graduate certificate, education specialist, master’s, or doctoral programs for the fall term.
Data for this report came from the 2021 CGS/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees, which got useable responses from 545 colleges and universities.
CGS President Dr. Suzanne Ortega noted that the survey and subsequent report did not investigate student motivation, so CGS could only provide plausible interpretations of the data, as opposed to causal statements.
Although the data shows higher first-time enrollment rates as a whole, for strictly U.S. citizens and permanent residents – domestic students – first-time graduate enrollment in general declined by 4%.
This comes after a 12.9% increase the previous year, between Fall 2019 and Fall 2020, and five years of gradual increases. The proportion of domestic first-time enrollment had gone from 78.9% in Fall 2016 to 87.4% in Fall 2020.
