​SDBOR Fall Enrollment Dashboard

Student enrollment traditionally has served as a foundational performance indicator in US higher education. In most cases, an institution’s size – as measured by student enrollment – correlates  closely with a variety of other measures, including faculty and staff size, revenues, expenditures, and assets.  As a result, student enrollment represents a basic but important indicator of institutional health.

Approximately one week after the beginning of each fall term, South Dakota’s public universities conduct a census of all enrolled students.  These figures are used for a variety of enrollment reporting efforts.  This dashboard summarizes two core measures of enrollment gathered through this process: headcount enrollment (i.e., the actual number of students enrolled at each university) and full-time equivalent enrollment (a.k.a., “FTE” enrollment, which indicates enrollment intensity at each university). 

In this dashboard, data are presented at the university level, meaning that each student is counted once per regental university enrolled.  To be sure then, data reported with the label “at the university...” refer to enrollments at the university submitting the extract data record.

Overall, the latest enrollment data from the university system suggest that:

• From Fall 2016 to Fall 2020, system-level headcount enrollments fell 8.1 percent, from 36,531 in Fall 2016 to 33,566 in Fall 2020.
  
• Full-time equivalent (FTE) enrollment in the university system has trended similarly over the same period, falling from 26,599 in Fall 2016 to 24,586 in Fall 2020.
  

Source: Regents Information Systems

Notes:

• All data are sourced from university census date extracts.
• Due to definitional overlap, FTE enrollment categories presented in this dashboard are not mutually exclusive.  For example, the same FTE enrollment may be reported separately in the “University Off-Campus” and “Distance” categories.
• FTE categories with a location specifier (i.e., on-campus, off-campus, centers, distance) do not include audit credits.
• This dashboard includes a “funding type” filter.  Be aware that individual students may be considered as both a “state-supported” and “self-supported” student, depending on the student’s specific combination of enrolled course sections.
• Programmer's note: the "Academic Classification" grouping above is based on the "academic level" field in Colleague.​​​​​​
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