More than two-thirds of students enrolled in public community colleges in fall 2022 were enrolled less than full-time.
This is the first of two DataPoints that describe part-time student enrollments in community colleges, as reported in various sources. In this DataPoints, the enrollment trends for fall and full-year enrollment are highlighted. The second DataPoints will explore student characteristics of part-time students, and a variation on part-time enrollment across several institutional characteristics.
The most commonly used source for enrollment data is the Fall Headcount Enrollment survey of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Surveys (IPEDS) collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). NCES annually collects the number of students enrolled for credits each fall at all postsecondary institutions eligible to award federal financial aid. These data provide a snapshot of enrollments at the point in time.
Fall headcount enrollment
Figure 1 provides the trend in part-time enrollment from fall 2009 to fall 2022. As this chart indicates, part-time students were only 58.9% of all community college students in fall 2010, but that rate steadily increased through 2021 (67.5%), then decreased slightly the next year (67.6%).
Across these years, female students were consistently more likely to be part-time. Students beginning their postsecondary education (first-time in college) were least likely to enroll part-time, and that rate is about the same in 2022 (39.5%), as it was in 2011(39.6%).
Students not new to postsecondary education (either transferring into the community college or continuing at the community college) were about equally likely to be enrolled part-time. Students identified as non-degree or credential-seeking comprised a greater percentage of students in community colleges in 2022 (25.9%) than their lowest representation in 2012 at 16.4%. All dual-enrolled high school students (regardless of their credential-seeking status) are classified as non-degree-seeking in IPEDS. Not surprisingly, most non-degree-seeking students were very likely to enroll part-time, with 91% enrolled part-time in 2022.
Figure 2 displays the percentage of students enrolled part-time by race/ethnicity in 2010 and 2022. There was more variation across the racial/ethnic background in terms of part-time enrollment in 2010, from a high of 63.8% for Hispanic students, to a low of 55.2% for Native American students. In fall 2022, with the exception of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders and students identified as more than one race, all were between 63.2% and 68.3% part-time enrollment.
Full-year unduplicated headcount enrollment
Beginning in the 2019-20 academic year, NCES began collecting full-year, unduplicated headcount by enrollment status. This provides a much better representation of students attending community colleges since many public two-year college students are not enrolled in the fall term but do attend in the spring or summer terms. However, the enrollment intensity is based on their first enrollment at the institution, not necessarily their enrollment that academic year. Since many community college students change their enrolment intensity, some caution needs to be taken when interpreting these data.
Figure 3 shows the trends for fall headcount and full-year initial attendance status of students enrolled in each of the academic years from 2019-20 through 2022-23. As the data show, the percentage of part-time students in the full-year cohort was relatively stable over time; however, the percentage was consistently higher for the full-year cohort, which would include students excluded from the fall headcount data, such as students only enrolled in the summer term classes.
Figure 4 delineates the four-year trend of part-time enrollment for the full-year unduplicated headcount. While the rate of part-time students is higher for the full-year enrollment data, the trends mirror those in the fall headcount enrollment data. For all three of the degree-seeking enrollment types (first-time in college, transfer-in and continuing), the percentage of part-time students is higher than in the fall headcount, while the percentage of part-time students in the non-degree-seeking was roughly the same.
