NCES’s ‘Condition of Education’ sheds light on enrollment trends, from early childhood to K-12 and postsecondary education
The 2024 edition of the Report on the Condition of Education brings together a wealth of vital information and insights from across the education spectrum, drawing from a vast collection of data to examine changes over time, including shifts in enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report — released Thursday by the National Center for Education Statistics, the statistical center within the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences — provides new enhancements this year to make the resource even more valuable, such as greater inclusion of data for outlying areas, expanded findings for private schooling and a new indicator spotlighting career and technical education.
“The Condition of Education report is a comprehensive and valuable tool to help tell the story of American education," said NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr. “We continue to witness important shifts in enrollment — and in so many other facets of the educational experience for American families. Having this comprehensive resource — whether the topic is enrollment, teacher turnover, career and technical education, even international comparisons — is powerful. As the nation has worked to respond to and learn from the pandemic, so has NCES. We continue our commitment to summarizing developments and trends in the education landscape by expanding and improving this Congressionally-mandated report.”
The new report shows that 59 percent of 3- to 5-year-old children were enrolled in some form of schooling, which was higher than in 2021 (53 percent) but still lower than 2019 (61 percent). This year’s edition of the Condition of Education, for the first time, includes a breakdown of this enrollment rate between public (39 percent) and private (20 percent) school settings. Note, homeschooling is included in this estimate of private school enrollment.
Additionally, the report shows that public preK–12 enrollment reached 49.6 million students in fall 2022, which was 0.4 percent higher than enrollment the year before but still 2 percent below the fall 2019 enrollment count of 50.8 million.
Meanwhile, the latest private school enrollment data from fall 2021 show that enrollment was stable, at 4.7 million students, compared with the pre-pandemic 2019 enrollment.
New to the 2024 Condition of Education is an indicator spotlighting career and technical education (CTE). This indicator presents data from a variety of sources, focusing primarily on the high school and postsecondary levels. It includes information on CTE teachers, high school CTE participation, and postsecondary CTE credentials.
For example, in 2020-21, among public schools hiring for at least one teaching position, 31 percent said they had difficulty with filling or were unable to fill open positions in CTE. This was higher than the percentages of public schools that reported having difficulties with filling or being unable to fill open positions for social studies, physical education or health, general elementary education, English or language arts, and music or art (ranging from 11 percent to 23 percent) but lower than the percentages that reported having difficulties with filling or being unable to fill open positions for physical sciences, special education, and foreign languages (37, 40 and 42 percent, respectively).
As another example, the CTE indicator shows that a higher percentage of high school CTE concentrators than nonconcentrators earned their associate’s degree in a CTE field (58 percent versus 45 percent). These data are for 2009 9th graders who graduated from a public high school in 2013 and earned an associate’s degree as their highest credential by June 2021.
As mandated by the U.S. Congress since 1974, the annual Report on the Condition of Education is designed to serve as a useful resource to practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and families. Topics covered range from early childhood education through postsecondary education, as well as labor force outcomes and international comparisons.
As an accompaniment to the Condition of Education report, NCES has updated its Digest of Education Statistics State Dashboard. This dashboard provides state-level data on topics of current interest in American education.
NCES intends in future years to embark on a modernization process to assure the Condition of Education continues to align with the current and future needs of users, Commissioner Carr noted.
“Our vision is to maintain the same level of rigor NCES is trusted for while also increasing the timeliness and level of detail found in the report,” Commissioner Carr said. “This may well include interim releases throughout the year as data become available, indicators reported at finer levels of geographic detail, and additional analyses to further describe the trends observed.”
Technical Note
The Report on the Condition of Education is a compilation of statistical information collected and assembled from other statistical products. For more information on the data sources, please visit https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/sources. To find the detailed tabulations that support the report, please visit https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/current_tables.
CTE concentrators: CTE concentrators are defined as those who earned 2 or more credits in the same CTE area during high school. Included CTE areas are as follows: agriculture and natural resources; business, finance, and marketing; communication and communications technologies; computer and information sciences; construction; consumer services; engineering, design, and production; health care; mechanical repair and operation; and public services.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, is the statistical center of the U.S. Department of Education and the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations. NCES fulfills a Congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report complete statistics on the condition and progress of American education; conduct and publish reports; and review and report on education activities internationally.
Follow NCES on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube and subscribe to the NCES Newsflash to receive email notifications when new data are released.
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the independent and nonpartisan statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Its mission is to provide scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and to share this information in formats that are useful and accessible to educators, parents, policymakers, researchers and the public.
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