The Curious Case of Youngening Grad Students

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The Curious Case of Youngening Grad Students<br>Grad students are getting younger, a trend with reverberations on both colleges and surrounding communities.

Nico Hohman<br>Jun 15, 2026

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Editorial Note: This is the first guest post in the “Summer School at College Towns” series. If you are interested in writing for College Towns, feel free to reach out to me on Substack or at ryanmallen555@gmail.com.<br>Today’s guest post comes from Nico Hohman, who runs the Plans & Principles Substack. He is also the Executive Director of Operations at Capitol Campus and is working on his Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning at Georgetown University. Enjoy. -Ryan

I wear two hats at Georgetown University. The first is as a staff member. My role as the Executive Director of Operations of the Capitol Campus gives me the opportunity to interact with just about every group on campus, from facilities to housing to student affairs to the provost’s office and everyone in between. My other hat is that of a graduate student. I will complete my master’s in Urban & Regional Planning in the spring of 2027.<br>It is through this dual-role lens that I discovered something interesting happening with graduate students: they are getting younger. What’s more, today’s graduate students aren’t just younger versions of previous cohorts. They behave differently too.<br>This discovery first started as a conversation with my colleagues. We were commenting that it looked like this cohort of graduate students appeared younger than previous groups. And as a current graduate student, I noticed the same thing in my classes. Though I’m far from being old (I’m only 37), it definitely felt like I was the old guy in class.<br>So I did what any good graduate student would do: I did some research. To the library!<br>Grad Students Really Are Getting Younger

As it turns out, our observations about these graduate students were correct. According to numbers from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), graduate students have been getting younger over the last 25 years. (Note: IPEDS data is a great source because institutions that receive federal funding for students are required to report data back to the federal government.)<br>Below is a graph showing the total enrollment of all graduate students across the United States since 2003, broken down into age-specific categories.

The topline number is obvious. Total graduate enrollment has grown by over 500,000 students in the last two decades. Lots of factors play into why graduate enrollment has increased, including more universities offering more graduate programs; more 4+1 dual enrollment programs like at the University of South Carolina, the University of Texas, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and many more; as well as economic cycles that favor graduate school enrollment when the economic outlook looks rough.<br>What is less obvious from the IPEDS data is how that growth is segmented by age. To better capture this growth among the youngest graduate students, I break down that growth by share. Below is a chart showing the share of graduate students over the last 25 years, categorized by three distinct age cohorts: 24-and-under, 25-to-29 year-olds, and those students over 30 years old. The oldest cohort, those 30 and older, has seen a decline in enrollment since the start of the new millennium, while the share of graduate students in the youngest cohort has grown by nearly 50%.

These three age cohorts were selected because it is assumed that the youngest cohort is moving directly from undergraduate to graduate studies. The middle cohort is assumed to have some experience in their originally selected fields and may be looking to obtain different credentials to pursue a different field of study. While this may also be true for the oldest cohort, it is more often assumed they are obtaining additional credentials to advance their current positions in the workforce.

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Introducing the Graduate Youth Index

To better highlight these trends, in the chart below I introduce the Graduate Youth Index. This index tracks the growth (or contraction) of these three specific age cohorts against their respective baseline shares in 2003. These three cohorts started with an Index score of 100, and each subsequent year their indices increased or decreased based on the enrollment of that age cohort. In the fall of 2025, the Index for graduate students 24-and-under was 138.7, the highest ever recorded. For graduate students 30-and-older that same semester, the Index was 83.8, the lowest ever recorded. Grad students in the middle cohort decreased their most recent Index score to 98.6.

The fact that universities have increased the number of graduate programs or that major economic disruptions have increased the desire to obtain additional credentials should be relevant to all age cohorts, and not just the youngest ones. So why are we only seeing growth in...