Postsecondary Institutions and Cost of Attendance in 2015-16; Degrees and Other Awards Conferred, 2014–15; and 12-Month Enrollment, 2014–15
By Betsy Prueter
Recently, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released preliminary data from IPEDS on cost of attendance, degrees award and enrollment numbers at 7,164 Title IV institutions. While data from the preliminary report covers tuition and fees only, the full report will include cost of attendance data including tuition and fees, books and supplies, room and board and other personal expenses such as transportation. Completion data will break down level of degree by race/ethnicity and gender, and enrollment numbers over a 12 month period will be provided by race/ethnicity, gender and student level (undergraduate vs. graduate).
A snapshot of the preliminary data is below:
- Average tuition and fees at public and nonprofit 4-year institutions increased from 2013-2014 to 2015-2016 while tuition and fees decreased very slightly at for-profit 4-year institutions.
- At public institutions both in-state and out-of-state students experienced a 4% increase in tuition and fees ($7,808 to $8,123 for in-state and $17,590 to $18,341 for out-of-state).
- Students at nonprofit 4-year institutions experienced close to a 4% increase ($25,298 to about $26,361).
- For-profit institutions’ tuition and fees decreased just less than 1% ($16,144 to $16,066).
- In 2014-2015, there were 3.2 million students who received degrees at a 4-year institution. Nearly 60% of those students earned a bachelor’s degree, almost 23% of those students received a master’s degrees and about 9% received an associate’s degrees.
- 58% of all degree earners were women.
- 43% of all degree earners were non-white.
- 4 million individual students enrolled from 2014-2015: 3.8 million were graduate students and 23.6 were undergraduate students.
- 8 million of these students enrolled in a public 4-year institution and 9.5 million of these students enrolled in a public 2-year institution.
