Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Science, Engineering, and Health Graduate Enrollment: U.S. Part-Time Enrollment Increases as Full-Time Temporary Visa Holder Enrollment Declines. InfoBrief. NSF 22-317

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered considerable shifts in enrollment patterns for both U.S. citizens and permanent residents and temporary visa-holding graduate students within science, engineering, and health (SEH) fields during the fall 2020. After 3 years of relative stability, full-time enrollment of temporary visa holders in SEH master's programs declined. First-time, full-time temporary visa holder enrollment was much lower in 2020 than 2019, with just over 25,000 fewer master's students and almost 6,000 fewer doctoral students starting in 2020 than in 2019. At the same time, enrollment of U.S. citizens and permanent residents continued to increase. Specifically, the number of U.S. citizens and permanent residents enrolled in full-time master's programs increased by about 13,600, and part-time master's enrollment increased a similar amount, about 13,400, between 2019 and 2020. These and other findings in this report are from the 2020 GSS, with comparisons to data from 2017 to 2019. Data from the GSS provide insight into the composition of the current and future science and engineering workforce by collecting data on graduate students, postdocs, and nonfaculty researchers (NFRs) in SEH fields.