College enrollment trends

Here is a handy post to show the growing demand for college. The first is the long-term historical trend by each decade since 1869. The GI Bills of the 1940’s and 1950’s caused the first spike, then the Higher Education Act of 1965 and expansion of student aid in the 1970’s explain the remainder of the growth. Of course there are other factors that explain the rising demand and mass expansion of higher education – like changes in the labor market, the role of women in the workplace, K-12 curriculum design, immigration, the Baby Boom, etc. The second graphic shows how enrollment looks by each “sector” of higher education – it may come as a surprise that more than 6.5 million of the total 17+ million students are enrolled in community colleges.