Phil Hill
August 24, 2026
I’ve covered the National Center for Education Statistics’ IPEDS data on distance education (i.e., online education) for the past 13 years, starting with this Fall 2012 profile and continuing to the recent Fall 2024 profile.
IPEDS has been invaluable to researchers and analysts trying to understand these enrollment trends, but a well-known weakness is that the most-used data come from the Fall Enrollment survey, which takes a snapshot approach: How many students fall into each category as of the institution’s fall reporting date (typically October 15 or the institution’s official fall census date). This approach does not capture the increasingly important nature of multiple starts per year, shorter terms, and habits of part-time working-adult students.
Starting with the 2019–20 data, NCES added distance education classifications to its 12-month Enrollment survey which more accurately represents the enrollment patterns of online courses and programs. The basis of the survey is a count of how many unduplicated students fit within each category over a 12-month period, from July 1 through June 30 (in this case, July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025). This better captures students working on flexible schedules that often don’t align with the October census date.