Computing up 56.9 percent, nursing flat: bachelor's degree production by field, 2018-19 to 2024-25

US institutions conferred 154,489 bachelor's degrees in registered nursing (CIP 51.38) in the 2018-19 award year and 154,529 in 2024-25. That is a net change of 40 awards over six years, or 0.03 percent. Over the same window the number of institutions awarding a bachelor's in registered nursing rose from 1,161 to 1,274, an increase of 113 programs or 9.7 percent. The programs multiplied. The graduates did not.

Computing ran the opposite pattern. Computer and information sciences (CIP 11) went from 89,529 bachelor's degrees to 140,495, a gain of 50,966 awards or 56.9 percent, off an institution count that barely moved: 1,467 to 1,482, fifteen more programs. Average graduates per institution awarding the degree went from 61.0 to 94.8 in computing, and from 133.1 to 121.3 in nursing.

The sector underneath both of those numbers did not grow. Total US bachelor's degrees went from 2,036,309 to 2,041,806, up 5,497 awards or 0.3 percent, so everything below is redistribution inside a flat total.

Every figure in this post comes from the IPEDS Completions file, comparing data_year 2019 against data_year 2025. In IPEDS, data_year 2025 is the 2024-25 award year and data_year 2019 is the 2018-19 award year. This post writes both out in full, so 2024-25 always means the award year and never calendar 2025. If the IPEDS vocabulary here is new, start with our plain-English IPEDS primer.

Six notes apply to every figure below, and three of them are query filters. Skip those three and your totals come out roughly double.

The flat nursing number is not a flat line. Bachelor-level registered nursing ran 154,489 in 2018-19, then 159,890, then a peak of 165,493 in 2020-21, then 162,729, then a drop to 153,519, then 153,285, then back to 154,529 in 2024-25. It round-tripped: six years of movement that nets to 40 awards.

The institution count runs the other way. There are 113 more institutions awarding a BSN than there were, and the average one graduated 133.1 students in 2018-19 against 121.3 in 2024-25, down 8.9 percent. Institutions added capacity, and output per program fell by close to the same proportion.

The rest of health looks similar. All of CIP 51 at the bachelor's level went from 257,059 to 256,090, a loss of 969 awards or 0.4 percent. Strip registered nursing out and the remainder went from 102,570 to 101,561, down 1.0 percent, across 1,400 institutions rising to 1,417. Health professions held 12.62 percent of all US bachelor's degrees in 2018-19 and 12.54 percent in 2024-25. Registered nursing alone is about 60 percent of the bachelor's-level health total: 154,529 of 256,090.

A field that moves 0.4 percent in aggregate can be churning underneath, and health is. The largest bachelor-level declines are in the clinical and allied codes: allied health diagnostic, intervention and treatment (51.09) fell from 11,060 to 7,962, down 3,098 awards or 28.0 percent; rehabilitation and therapeutic professions (51.23) fell from 4,598 to 3,159, down 1,439 or 31.3 percent; communication disorders sciences (51.02) fell from 11,237 to 10,119, down 1,118 or 9.9 percent; dietetics and clinical nutrition (51.31) fell from 2,837 to 1,979, down 858 or 30.2 percent.

The gains sit in the general and population-health codes. Health services and health sciences, general (51.00) went from 16,420 to 20,893, up 4,473 awards or 27.2 percent. Public health (51.22) went from 16,586 to 18,429, up 1,843 or 11.1 percent. Health and medical administrative services (51.07) added 549.

The codes that grew are the broad ones, and several of the codes that shrank are tied to a specific licensed clinical role. A dean who reads "health is flat" and moves on will miss a 3,098-award hole in one CIP4 and a 4,473-award gain in another.

Computing is the one large field that changed shape rather than drifting. CIP 11 rose in every year of the window: 89,529, then 97,930, 105,814, 109,597, 114,773, 122,747, and 140,495 in 2024-25. Its share of all US bachelor's degrees went from 4.40 percent to 6.88 percent.

Three CIP4 codes carry almost all of it. Computer science proper (11.07) went from 30,422 to 51,527, up 21,105 awards or 69.4 percent. Computer and information sciences, general (11.01) went from 35,658 to 52,157, up 16,499 or 46.3 percent. Computer and IT administration and management (11.10) went from 7,014 to 17,351, up 10,337 or 147.4 percent, which is the fastest rate in the family but sits on a 2018-19 base of 7,014, so read the rate with the base attached. Together those three account for 47,941 of the 50,966 net gain, about 94 percent. Two codes went backwards: data processing (11.03) fell from 178 to 130, down 27.0 percent, and computer systems analysis (11.05) fell from 1,070 to 962, down 10.1 percent.

One caution before anyone benchmarks against 56.9 percent: the national rate sits on a badly skewed distribution. The top 10 institutions by absolute gain account for 14,790 awards, 29.0 percent of the national net gain, and the top 25 account for 22,239, or 43.6 percent. Western Governors University alone went from 2,016 computing bachelor's degrees to 6,480, a gain of 4,464, which is 8.8 percent of the national net gain from one institution. Southern New Hampshire University went from 640 to 3,444, a gain of 2,804. A regional public benchmarking its own computing growth against the national rate is measuring itself against a number that one institution moved by 8.8 percent.

Thirty-eight CIP2 broad fields awarded bachelor's degrees in both years, and they sum exactly to the national totals of 2,036,309 and 2,041,806, so nothing below is an unclassified residual.

Business (CIP 52) is still the largest field by a distance, and it slipped: 393,921 to 388,820, down 5,101 awards or 1.3 percent, with share falling from 19.34 to 19.04 percent. Psychology (CIP 42) is the largest absolute gainer after computing, from 117,799 to 141,063, up 23,264 or 19.7 percent, with share rising from 5.78 to 6.91 percent. Biological and biomedical sciences (CIP 26) added 11,513, up 9.3 percent.

The declines are concentrated in the fields that used to define general education. Social sciences (CIP 45) lost the most in absolute terms, 138,200 to 122,016, down 16,184 awards or 11.7 percent. Communication and journalism (CIP 09) lost 14,710, down 15.8 percent. English language and literature (CIP 23) lost 9,049, down 22.9 percent. Engineering (CIP 14) lost 7,758, down 6.1 percent, which surprises people who assume engineering and computing move together. Family and consumer sciences (CIP 19) lost 7,363, down 30.7 percent, and liberal arts and general studies (CIP 24) lost 7,696, down 17.3 percent.

Two results cut against the usual narratives. Education (CIP 13) grew, 85,275 to 88,363, up 3,088 awards or 3.6 percent, straight through six years of teacher-shortage coverage. And on a 2018-19 base of 5,000 or more, the second-fastest grower after computing is transportation and materials moving (CIP 49), 5,077 to 7,406, up 45.9 percent, with architecture (CIP 04) third at 8,914 to 11,590, up 30.0 percent.

The steepest percent decline on that same 5,000-plus base is family and consumer sciences (CIP 19), 23,971 to 16,608, down 7,363 awards or 30.7 percent, followed by foreign languages, literatures and linguistics (CIP 16) at 16,779 to 11,814, down 29.6 percent, and area, ethnic, cultural and gender studies (CIP 05) at 7,748 to 5,939, down 23.3 percent.

Two fields are deliberately missing from that ranking, and the reason is a good illustration of why raw CIP2 trends need checking before anyone quotes them. Taken at face value, theology and religious vocations (CIP 39) falls 9,750 to 5,872, down 39.8 percent, the steepest decline in the file, and philosophy and religious studies (CIP 38) rises 9,822 to 11,342, up 15.5 percent. Neither is real. The CIP 2020 edition moved Talmudic Studies out of CIP 39 and into CIP 38: code 39.0606 reports for the last time in 2018-19 with 2,357 bachelor's awards, and code 38.0207 appears for the first time in 2019-20 with 2,431. Hold that one reclassification constant and CIP 39 falls 20.6 percent rather than 39.8, while CIP 38 does not grow at all, it falls 6.9 percent. A sign flip on one field and a halving on the other, from a single code move. The two rows stay in the full table below because the award counts are accurate as filed, but they are excluded from both charts and from the superlatives, and any CIP2 series that spans 2019-20 deserves the same check before it reaches a slide.

Below a 2018-19 base of 5,000, percentages stop meaning much. Military technologies (CIP 29) grew 127.2 percent, which is 995 awards. Precision production (CIP 48) fell 40.4 percent, which is 19 awards. Those rows are in the table, at the bottom, and should be read as small-field movers rather than compared against the large fields.

Share is percent of that year's national bachelor's total. The last nine rows before the total, CIP 10 down through CIP 48, have a 2018-19 base under 5,000 and should be read as small-field movers rather than compared directly against the large fields.

Widen the frame past the bachelor's and the flatness looks even stranger. Total US postsecondary awards across all credential levels went from 5,216,103 to 5,701,913, up 485,810 awards or 9.3 percent, a figure that carries the sub-one-year certificate caveat described below. The bachelor's degree, at plus 0.3 percent, barely participated, and the associate degree at minus 0.4 percent did not either. Those two are the only levels in the file that sat still.

Graduate credentials did most of the work. Master's degrees went from 845,739 to 983,036, up 137,297 or 16.2 percent. Research doctorates rose 18.2 percent, professional-practice doctorates 12.6 percent. The fastest-growing credential level in the country is the postbaccalaureate certificate, 50,874 to 78,812, up 54.9 percent, with post-master's certificates up 20.9 percent behind it.

The associate degree looks flat in total, 1,046,039 to 1,041,811, down 0.4 percent, but that total is one field holding everything else down. Liberal arts and general studies (CIP 24) at the associate level fell from 410,934 to 368,133, a loss of 42,801 awards or 10.4 percent, which alone explains the flat headline. Underneath it, associate-level computing grew 44.4 percent (32,224 to 46,530), associate-level health grew 4.7 percent (187,855 to 196,682) while bachelor-level health fell, psychology grew 39.3 percent, agriculture 66.9 percent, mechanic and repair technologies 24.1 percent, and security and protective services fell 22.0 percent.

Certificates grew fastest of all, and they are also the weakest numbers in this post. IPEDS retired award level 1 after 2019 and replaced it with the 20 and 21 split from 2020 onward, so the plus 37.5 percent gain in sub-one-year certificates (556,387 to 764,998) mixes a real trend with a reporting-category change. Read with that caveat, and counting undergraduate certificates at every level, health is the largest certificate field and it grew 10.6 percent (291,451 to 322,276), computing certificates grew 70.6 percent (44,384 to 75,730), and construction trades grew fastest among large certificate fields at 80.7 percent (30,093 to 54,368). Degree levels are unaffected by the redefinition.

The sub-one-year certificate row compares IPEDS award level 1 in 2018-19 against levels 20 and 21 in 2024-25, because IPEDS retired code 1 after 2019 and split it in two. That row mixes a real trend with a category change and should not be quoted without the caveat attached.

Hold CIP 51.38 fixed and vary the credential, and nursing stops looking static. Associate degrees in registered nursing went from 83,212 to 90,467, up 8.7 percent. The bachelor's went nowhere. The master's actually shrank, 51,088 to 47,827, down 6.4 percent. And the top of the pipeline expanded hard: the doctor of nursing practice went from 5,525 to 10,008, up 81.1 percent, post-master's certificates in nursing from 2,584 to 5,139, up 98.9 percent, and the nursing PhD from 2,894 to 3,850, up 33.0 percent.

Separately, practical and vocational nursing and nursing assistant certificates (CIP 51.39) went from 91,114 to 106,773, up 17.2 percent, though that code sits inside the certificate caveat above.

So the field is producing more entry-level nurses and many more doctorally prepared ones, while the credential in the middle has stayed flat for six years across a growing number of programs. Whether any of that keeps pace with hiring is a separate question with a separate denominator, and graduates per opening works it out: 1.39 nursing graduates per projected annual opening at all levels, 0.47 counting only the associate degrees that are almost entirely pre-licensure.

Program review packets and enrollment forecasts tend to inherit their assumptions from a narrative rather than from the completions file. Five of those assumptions break against these numbers.

For enrollment forecasting specifically, the nursing series is the cautionary case. A model fit on the 2018-19 through 2020-21 stretch (154,489, then 159,890, then 165,493) sees a field climbing steadily and projects upward from a 165,493 peak. What actually followed was 162,729, then 153,519, then 153,285, then 154,529. If your program viability model is running on a pandemic-era slope, it is forecasting a boom that already reversed. Our piece on forecasting enrollment and program viability covers how to frame that uncertainty for a cabinet audience.

Source: IPEDS Completions (survey component C), table ipeds.completions_by_program, data_year 2019 (file C2019_A_RV, the revised 2019 release) compared against data_year 2025 (file C2025_A, the first provisional 2025 release, loaded 2026-07-29). CIP titles come from ppd.dim_cip, PPD release_year 2026, normalized for the double spaces the source carries where an official CIP title contains a comma. Institution names come from ipeds.institutions, data_year 2025.

Every query carried three guards: majornum = 1, cipcode not equal to 99, and an explicit awlevel filter. Award level 5 as the bachelor's degree and majornum 1 as the first major were both confirmed against ipeds_data_dictionary_new.value_codes rather than assumed, because the catalog metadata on the completions table itself returns null descriptions and null value mappings.

Two independent checks ran before any of the above was written up. First, the cipcode 99 institution grand-total rows sum to 2,041,806 for 2024-25 bachelor's degrees, exactly matching the sum of all CIP-detail rows, which confirms the 38-field breakout has no missing or unclassified residual. Second, the imputation flags: 82,435 of the 82,439 bachelor's rows in the 2024-25 file (99.995 percent) carry flag R for reported by the institution, and the other 4 rows, 82 awards in total, carry flag C for analyst corrected. Nothing in the bachelor's file is imputed at all.

On completeness, the table below is the check. Rows, reporting institutions and total awards in the 2024-25 file are all at or above the prior year, which is what a full release looks like. It is still the first provisional file rather than a revised one, so the figures may shift slightly on revision, and single-institution figures are more exposed to that than national aggregates. Our federal data release calendar covers when the revised files land.

IPEDS, Use the Data (NCES), the source portal for the Completions (component C) files used here, including C2019_A_RV and C2025_A. IPEDS CIP 2020 code browser (NCES), the code edition in force at the 2024-25 endpoint. IPEDS survey components overview (NCES) for the Completions component definition and collection cycle.

The full reproducible query log for this post, 19 numbered SQL queries with their outputs, lives in the repository at docs/data-evidence/bachelors-degrees-by-field-what-grew-what-stalled/queries.md, with the table, grain and column definitions in schema.md alongside it.