ResearchEducation & Skills

Data Spotlight: Who’s enrolling in college and what are they studying?

Jul 16, 2026
Ben Smith, Mike Hurwitz
College students attend lecture in a well-lit classroom

This piece is a part of ongoing research collaboration between the American Institute for Boys and Men and the College Board.

Key takeaways

  • Through 2024, young men remain less likely than women to be enrolled in college—by about 10 percentage points overall, and by varying margins across race and ethnicity.
  • Among bachelor’s degrees awarded to men, the share in standard STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields rose from 23% in 2011 to 32% in 2024. Among degrees awarded to women, the STEM share rose from 10% to 15%.
  • Growth in the share earning HEAL (health, education, and literacy)-related degrees has been smaller, rising less than 1 percentage point for men and 4 percentage points for women (20% to 24%) over the same period.

How enrollment has changed

In a previous brief, we documented the long rise in women’s college enrollment relative to men’s. Updated data through 2024 show that the pattern has changed little in the past two years. Among 18-24 year-olds, 43% of women and 34% of men were enrolled in degree-granting institutions in 2024. The gap, which opened in the early 1990s and widened through the 2000s, has remained near 10 percentage points since the early 2010s.

Figure 1

The same pattern occurs within race and ethnicity, but the baseline levels differ significantly. Asian young adults are enrolled at far higher rates than any other group—59% of men and 63% of women in the most recent cohort. Among men, White, Black, and Hispanic enrollment have all drifted downward from their early-2010s peaks (not shown); Hispanic men’s enrollment rose substantially in the late 2000s before declining to 26% in 2022–24.

While enrollment rates for men overall have slightly declined, this is driven by the declines among White men. Enrollment rates among Hispanic and Black men have increased over this period and the White-Black male enrollment gap has closed by half to 5 percentage points.

Hispanic women’s enrollment rates rose from 29% in 2004-06 to a 2016-18 peak of 42% before declining to 37%. Enrollment rates for Black women rose from 37% to 41%—about 10 points above Black men in the same cohort.

Figure 2

These enrollment figures include students attending both two-year and four-year degree-granting institutions, including community colleges. The fields-of-study analysis below, however, is limited to bachelor’s degrees and therefore does not capture associate degrees or certificates.

What enrolled students study

Among those who complete a bachelor’s degree, fields of study have shifted in two notable ways. The first is the rising popularity of STEM, shown in figure 3. In 2011, 23% of men’s and 10% of women’s bachelor’s degrees were in standard STEM fields (which exclude health professions and include biology). By 2024, those shares had risen to 32% and 15% — gains of about 9 and 5 percentage points. This increasing popularity holds across every racial group, with the largest absolute gain among Asian men (36% to 51%, +14.4 points).

Figure 3

The second shift is in majors that feed into the HEAL economy—occupations centered on health, education, and literacy. Because fields of study do not map neatly onto occupations, we use a deliberately narrow measure here, limited to health professions and related programs and education. Other majors, like psychology, may also lead to HEAL work, but the connection between major and occupation is less direct. The results below should be read as trends in selected, clearly connected HEAL-related majors rather than a comprehensive count of all students who may eventually work in HEAL occupations.

Among bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, the share in HEAL-related majors rose from 20% to 24% between 2011 and 2024, a 4-percentage-point gain that holds across every race group. The gain among Black women is especially large: from 18% to 28%.

Figure 4

For men, the HEAL share rose less than 1 percentage point, remaining at 6% over the 2011-2024 time horizon. The largest male gain was among Hispanic men at +2.2 points. Education’s share was roughly similar for both sexes over this time period, and growth among men and women in HEAL-related majors came entirely from health professions.

Data note

In health-related professions, the female-male gap widened in every racial group: from 7 to 12 percentage points among Asian graduates, 9 to 17 among Black graduates, 6 to 11 among Hispanic graduates, and 10 to 14 among White graduates. Education’s share was roughly constant (falling by less than a percentage point) for both sexes over the period, and the gender gap in education was mostly stable or smaller by 2024.

Individuals in the ‘Total’ category also include US degrees awarded to students with an unknown race/ethnicity, two or more races, and non-citizens.

Why these patterns are important

Women continue to enroll in college at higher rates than men, a pattern that holds across racial and ethnic groups. At the same time, STEM has captured a growing share of bachelor’s degrees for both men and women. HEAL-related majors, such as education and health care professions, have also grown as a share of women’s degrees, but not men’s. The trend in HEAL degrees is especially important, because much of the recent and projected job growth is in health care and related fields. If men remain underrepresented in the educational pathways leading into those jobs, they may miss out on one of the stronger sources of labor-market opportunity. Workforce planning should therefore take both patterns seriously: STEM pipelines are widening for both sexes, while growth in health and education degrees is still coming disproportionately from women.

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