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By Keonna Feaster, Program Manager, Best Practices; Hironao Okahana, Assistant Vice President, Research & Policy Analysis; and Jeff Allum, Former Assistant Vice President, Research & Policy Analysis, Council of Graduate Schools
The recently released Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 2005 to 2015 (Okahana, Feaster, & Allum, 2016) report provides a comprehensive look at master’s and research doctoral enrollment in the United States. The report set new records for applications for admission (more than 2.18 million), offers of admission (over 877,000), and first-time enrollment (nearly 507,000) in graduate certificate, education specialist, master’s, or doctoral programs in Fall 2015. The report also found increases in first-time graduate enrollment for all underrepresented minority (URM) groups between Fall 2014 and Fall 2015, although they still represent a smaller share of the overall graduate student population. In addition to one-year increases in first-time enrollment among underrepresented minority students there was an increase (3.8%) in first-time enrollments for U.S. citizens and permanent residents, the largest one-year increase since 2010. These gains contributed to a 3.9% overall one-year increase in all first-time graduate enrollments, which is the largest increase since 2009.
The results from the survey are portrayed in the report in a variety of ways, including breakdowns by student and institutional characteristics. The report does not – and has not – portrayed results according to institutional type beyond Carnegie classification. Since the college football season has recently started, this article compares applications, offers of admission, and first-time graduate enrollment by NCAA Division I-A football conferences. There are currently nine NCAA Division I-A conferences containing at least five CGS member institutions. Two Division I-A conferences, Conference USA and FBS Independents, did not have five responding institutions and were therefore not included in this analysis.
In terms of participation by CGS member institutions, the ACC, Big Ten, and SEC conferences include the largest number, with fourteen each, while the Sun Belt (11) and Big 12 conference (10) contained the smallest number of CGS member institutions. With respect to the types of institutions represented by the selected conferences, the Mid-American, Mountain West, and Sun Belt are the only conferences which do not contain private, not-for-profit institutions and the only ones which contain master’s-focused institutions (See Table 1).
The 2015 GE&D report showed that more applications for admission were submitted to master’s programs (1,518,973) than doctoral programs (656,928). Just as there were more applications for admission to master’s programs among the selected NCAA football conferences, there were more conferences with higher acceptance rates for master’s than for doctoral programs. The Pac-12 (19.6%), Big Ten (19.2%), and the ACC (15.7%) conferences had the largest shares of acceptance rates for master’s programs (See Figure 1). Those same conferences, in different order, also had the largest shares of the acceptance rates for doctoral programs. The ACC and Pac-12 conferences had the most similar acceptance rates for both master’s and doctoral programs while the gap between the acceptance rates for master’s and doctoral programs was widest for the Big Ten conference (19.2% and 25.3% respectively). These differences in acceptance rates among master’s and doctoral programs may be impacted by institution type (e.g., research universities with high research activity) among other factors which may attract students to the institutions with those conferences.
In terms of the distribution of race/ethnicity among the selected NCAA Division I-A football conferences, White students had a larger share of first-time enrollment (67.3%) followed by Hispanic/Latino and Black/African Americans (8.8% and 8.0%, respectively). Hispanic/Latino and Black/African American students were also found to have higher first-time enrollment than their share of overall enrollment within the American Athletic (12.8% and 8.8% respectively) and Sun Belt (17.4% and 9.2% respectively) conferences (See Table 1).
There was also a notable difference in first-time graduate enrollment of Hispanic/Latino and Black/African American students in the Mountain West and Pac-12 conferences. Nearly six times more Hispanic/Latino students were enrolled for the first-time within an institution in the Mountain West conference (18.3%) than their Black/African American counterparts (3.2%). Additionally, twice the shares of Hispanic/Latino students (12.6%) than Black/African American students were enrolled for the first-time as a graduate student in an institution in the Pac-12 conference (5.6%).
U.S. citizens and permanent residents (78.0%) accounted for a larger share of first-time graduate enrollment then their temporary resident counterparts (22.0%) in the Fall 2015 report. However, there were slightly more temporary residents within the selected conferences (25.9%) (See Table 2). In fact, there were three conferences, the Big Ten (32.5%), ACC (29.7%), Pac-12 (27.3%), which had even larger populations of temporary residents who were first-time enrollees in graduate programs. The Sun Belt conference had the lowest share of temporary residents (10.7%) among all nine conferences included in this article.
Many different factors may help to explain the differences in first-time enrollment by race/ethnicity and citizenship by these clusters. For example, geographic location is one possibility as there are some regions of the U.S. which attract specific populations of students. The availability of non-student loan financial support, program offerings, targeted recruitment, and institution types (universities with very high research activity, etc.) are other factors which may help to explain higher first-time enrollment of certain graduate students, such as Hispanic/Latino students and international students.
Graduate Enrollment & Degrees: 2005 to 2015 includes responses from 617 institutions, presents statistics on graduate applications and enrollment for Fall 2015, degrees conferred in 2014-15, and trend data for one-, five- and ten-year periods. It is the only annual survey that collects data on graduate enrollment by all fields of study and is the only source of national data on graduate applications by broad field of study. That data serves as an integral part of the State Snapshots: Select Data on Graduate Education. Member institutions interested in receiving some or all of that information in customized data reports can do so through CGS’ Strategic Benchmarking services.
Reference
Okahana, H., Feaster, K., & Allum, J. (2016). Graduate enrollment and degrees: 2005 to 2015. Washington, DC: Council of Graduate Schools.
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