The National Catholic Educational Association conducts Catholic education research as well as providing private education resources for a range of audiences. Information contained within these pages include Catholic school data. NCEA published selected results from NCEA's annual survey of Catholic elementary and secondary schools, including enrollment patterns, regional geographic trends, types and locations of schools, student and staffing demographic characteristics, and student participation in selected education programs .
Total Catholic school student enrollment for the current academic year is 1,789,363.
Student diversity: 21.2% are racial minorities, 17.8% are Hispanic/Latino and 6.2% were reported as unknown in the racial data collection.
Non-Catholic enrollment is 334,887 which is 18.7% of the total enrollment.
There are 6,289 Catholic schools: 5,092 elementary; 1,197 secondary.
1,866 schools have a waiting list for admission.
Coeducational schools comprise 98.6% of elementary and 70.8% of secondary schools. At the secondary level, 12.5% of the schools are male and 16.6% are female.
*The reported number of schools closed includes some that consolidated and re-opened as new entities. The total reported opened is 19 which includes newly built as well as the reconfigured entities. The net loss of elementary schools is 66 and the net gain of secondary schools is 3.
The student/teacher ratio is 12:1.
U. S. Catholic school enrollment reached its peak during the early 1960s when there were more than 5.2 million students in almost thirteen thousand schools across the nation. The 1970s and 1980s saw a steep decline in both the number of schools and students. By 1990, there were approximately 2.5 million students in 8,719 schools. From the mid-1990s through 2000, there was a steady enrollment increase (1.3%) despite continued closings of schools.
In the 10 years since the 2009 school year, 1,267 schools were reported closed or consolidated (18.1%), while 258 school openings were reported. Due to different definitions used by dioceses for consolidations, closings and their transitions into new configurations, along with actual new schools opened, the actual decrease in number of schools since 2009 is 959 (13.2%). The number of students declined by 403,168 (18.4%).
The most seriously impacted have been elementary schools. Since 2009, elementary school enrollment has declined by 27.5% in the 12 urban dioceses and 19.4% in the rest of the U.S.
There has been some good news as well during the 2009-2019 period as 258 new schools opened in all parts of the country.