As Morgan State University celebrates a second historic year in enrollment, we took an in focus look at enrollment at universities nationwide, and at the University System of Maryland to put that news in context.
The National Center for Education Statistics has decades of data showing enrollment in the fall semester of each year - and has projected data through 2030.
![Graph showing national post-secondary enrollment between 2011 and 2020 with projection graphed through 2030.](https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/ed36506/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1086x725+0+0/resize/1086x725!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fewscripps-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fbb%2Fa0%2Feaf4ad2344f783d85ce8a53229c8%2Fnational-enrollment-for-web.jpg)
Its most recent data comes from the Fall of 2020, which showed a larger drop in enrollment, likely due to the pandemic, but since 2011, enrollment had been going down.
The NCES does project enrollment to start trending up again.
We also took a look at total enrollment data from the University System of Maryland over time.
Overall, enrollment has gone down since 2018, however, if we look back to 2010, the numbers are trending up.
![](https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/2db445b/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1098x759+0+0/resize/1098x759!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fewscripps-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ff0%2F86%2F34cc7fea429c8aa53021a61933a4%2Fusm-total-enrollment-for-web.jpg)
And we can break that out by schools to see which ones were trending up and which were trending down and we found an even split among the ten schools (not including the Global Campus, which is trending up).
![](https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/b8f23cf/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1094x733+0+0/resize/1094x733!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fewscripps-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ff4%2Fbb%2Fac39d01e441c9bb681afa68ec1cb%2Fusm-enrollment-trends-for-web.jpg)