As enrollments at American colleges continue to soar, vaulting past the 17 million mark in fall 2002, students grow ever more likely to be black or Hispanic and female and to attend community colleges or for-profit institutions, according to the latest statistics from the U.S. Education Department.

The department on Thursday released a report, "Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2002 and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2002," which provides the latest available look at who students are and where they're going. The last comparable report looked at enrollments two years earlier.

Over all, the latest statistics show that colleges that qualify to award federal financial aid enrolled 17,288,483 students in fall 2002, up from 15,924,028 in fall 2000. That's an increase of 1,364,455, or 8.6 percent.

Just over 17 million of those students were at colleges in the contiguous United States -- the rest were at institutions in U.S. territories. Of those 17 million:

• About 6.6 million, or 39.0 percent, attended two-year colleges, up from 6.1 million (or 38.6 percent) in fall 2000. The proportion of students attending four-year colleges declined from 59.6 to 59.2 percent.
• Nearly 12.9 million of the students, or 75.6 percent, attended public institutions and 3.3 million attended private nonprofit institutions. While they represented a small fraction of all students, the number of students attending for-profit institutions grew to about 850,000 (or 5 percent), up from about 673,000 (4.3 percent) in 2000.
• The proportion of students who are male continued to shrink, dropping from 43.7 percent in 2000 to 43.1 percent in 2002.
• The proportion of students who are black and Hispanic continued to grow, while the proportion of white students declined and the proportion of Asian students held steady. 

One slightly surprising statistic: the proportion of full-time students increased between 2000 and 2002, climbing from 59.2 percent to 60.3 percent.

                                            Source: U.S. Education Department