The mindset that a good education is a road to success has permeated our society for many decades. We live in a new, complex and technologically advanced world where this statement deserves more press than ever.

Below you will see many statistics and numbers quoted. The enrollment gains may be a result of not only the desire for more Americans choosing to educate themselves, but may also be the result of population growth to some extent.

Overall and Men Verses Women Enrollment

Enrollment for all institutions that offered degrees grew by 16 percent between the years 1985 and 1995. Between 1995 and 2005, enrollment increased at a rate of 23%, a total of 14.3 million to 17.5 million students. Females constituted the majority of new enrollments from 1995 to 2005 accounting for 27% of the new students while men were responsible for only 18% of new enrollments. . In comparing part-time at 9% to full-time enrollments at 33%, we see that the majority of all new students chose a full schedule.

From High School to College

Moving from high school to college is a natural course of action for most. This is a period of choices where the individual's entire life progress is charted. We see a larger increase in those directly out of high school. From 1995 to 2005 the number of 18 to 24 year olds increased from 25.5 million to 29.3 million students. The numbers in the age range from 18 to 24 enrolled in colleges or universities grew from 34% to 39%. Between 1990 and 2005, the enrollment of younger students, those under the age of 25 grew by 32%.

Older Students Returning to College

Enrollment of older individuals 25 and over grew by 19% in the same period of time. While the number of younger students has been growing quicker than the number of older students, this most likely will change in the coming years. Projections in the coming years anticipate a rise of 11 percent in enrollments from 2005 to 2015, of individuals under age 25, and a rise of 18 percent in enrollments of individuals 25 and over.

Become a Professional

It seems as if the ultimate goal for our society is to become a doctor or lawyer. There was a big push in the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s where the degree of choice seemed to be the master of business or MBA.

In looking at this segment of college statistics, student enrollment levels are different for undergraduate, graduate and first professional levels.

During the 1970s, undergraduate student population increased but suffered a slight dip in from 1983 to 1985. From the years 1985 to 1992 we saw an increase in enrollment for undergraduate students. There was an 18% rise during this period with a small period of decline and then a stabilized enrollment from 1993 to 1996. The undergraduates increased in size to 21% between 1996 and 2005.

If we take a snapshot of graduate enrollment numbers, we will see that this segment has pretty-well held steady at about 1.3 million from the late 1970s to the early1980s. When we move to the 1985 to 2005 period we see a rather large push and pickup in student enrollment to a total of 59% increase for this 20 year period.

For first professional programs, there was a very large rise in the 1970s and then the numbers stabilized in the 1980s. The enrollment for this sector rose again some in the 1990s and had an increase of 13% between 1995 and 2005.

Men Verses Women

Women seem to dominate the graduate school realm as their enrollment numbers have exceeded men since 1984. If you look at the number of male full-time graduate students from 1995 to 2005, you will see that they increased only 27% as compared to a whopping 65% increase for women during the same time period. These overwhelmingly dominant figures for women hold true even for part-time students with a 18 % increase for women and only a 4 % increase for men who only attended part-time during this 1995 to 2005 time period.

Minority Student Growth and Education in America

We are seeing substantial increases in minority student populations. If we look at the year 1976, our Bicentennial year, we see that only 15% of the student population was minorities. By 2005, this number climbed to 31%. Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Islanders account for the lion-share of this rise from 1976 to 2005 with the following breakout: Asian and Pacific Islander rose from 2% to 6 %, while Hispanic rose from 3% to 11%. In regards to the black student population during this period, this minority group started at 9% rising to 13% by 2005.

Larger Colleges Won-Out

It seems as though the larger campuses were preferred to the smaller colleges, even though the shear number of these smaller institutions are large. If we take a closer look at a snapshot of the fall of 2005, we see that 12% of the institutions had enrollment numbers of 10,000 or more, accounting for 54% of the total college enrollment. While the smaller, more prolific colleges with less than 1000 students accounted for 40% of the institutions out there but only enrolling 4% of the total college students.

Colleges with Highest Enrollment

It seems that these large mega-campuses are desired as they are perceived as having the best instructors and programs due to sheer size. The five enrollment winners in 2005, starting with the leader by far were, the University of Phoenix Online Campus, sporting 117,309 students; Miami-Dade College, enrolling 54,169 students; Arizona State University with 51,612 students; the University of Minnesota with 51,175 students; and Western International University with 50,663 students.

What about College Staff and Faculty?

The higher education system in America employs many millions of individuals. It is robust and very much alive and well. In 2005 there was a total of 3.4 million individuals in the employ of colleges and universities. Of these, 2.5 million were actually professional staff members with 900,000 as nonprofessional and support staff members. For the actual degree-granting facilities, there were 700,000 full-time and 600,000 part-time faculty. Contributing to the quality of education in our country are gradually declining student/staff and student/faculty ratios. In 1976 the student/staff ratio was 5.4. In 2005 we see a gradual decrease to 5.0. For the same period we see a student/faculty ration in 1976 of 16.6 and in 2005 a ratio of 15.0.