About Searching Enrollment Data

This database offers access to information about enrollments in languages other than English—previously available only in published MLA reports and unpublished data records—from the twenty-two surveys conducted by the Modern Language Association between 1958 and 2009 and funded by the United States Department of Education. A report on the most recent survey, Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2009, can be found here.

Database users should note that the MLA surveys count course enrollments, not students. A student may be enrolled in more than one language course. Note also that a graduate student enrolled in an undergraduate course will be counted as an undergraduate enrollment.

During the fifty-one year span of the surveys, there have been changes in methodology, inclusion of new categories, language and institutional name changes, and other variations.

• Names of languages are entered as reported to us in each survey. Because a language or variant may appear under different names, as with Farsi and Persian, Chinese, Mandarin, and Cantonese, or Yupic and Yupik, users may wish to select from the full list of languages. Language variants or different course names may produce enrollment listings that must be searched separately but might usefully be considered together, as in the case of Filipino, Pilipino, and Tagalog or Ancient Greek, Biblical Greek, and Koine Greek.

• Some institutions have had more than one name or have changed status over time. Our records list institutions under the name they held at the time of each survey. Users may find it helpful to look for variants in the full list of institutions in panel 2 (select the institution radio button to bring up the list).

Some information about institutions and languages may not be available for all years.

• The breakdown between two-year and four-year institutions is currently only available for 2006 and 2009.
• The breakdown between lower- and upper-level undergraduate enrollments is only available for 2006 and 2009 and only for searches by state and by institution, not for searches for data for the entire United States.
• Data disaggregated by institution, by state, or by enrollment level may not be available for all languages or all survey years.
• Some surveys are anomalous. The 1971 survey treats summer rather than fall enrollments and currently covers only the less commonly taught languages. Searches for enrollments in commonly taught languages in 1971 will result in zeroes that signify not that the language was not taught in that year but that we have no data entered at this time. The 1958 and 1959 surveys aggregated all language enrollments other than French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish under “Other Languages.” The 1972 survey aggregated all language enrollments other than Ancient Greek, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, and Spanish, also under “Other Languages.”

While the database is comprehensive, for practical reasons the search interface only allows searches of up to eight languages, in eight surveys, in eight states or institutions. The complete data set for all surveys combined is available to researchers in the following Excel files: