Useful Stats

Led by increases in retail trade and professional, scientific, and technical services, the number of annual business applications nationwide has increased 119%, or nearly three million, from 2005 to 2023. However, the share of applications classified as high-propensity, or those more likely to result in businesses with a payroll, has decreased in all but the health care and social assistance sector, leading to a 26-percent point drop (58% to 32%) over the same period.

This article builds upon a prior SSTI article covering the same data, but examines which two-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) industry sectors are generating more new business applications and which are declining. For a list of all NAICS sectors and their codes, refer to the NAICS Association website.

Business applications have greatly increased over the last two decades, jumping 119% from 2005 to 2023. However, the rate of high-propensity business applications—applications identified by the Census Bureau as having higher likelihoods of turning into businesses with payroll—have decreased as a share of all applications every year since 2005, despite having grown 22% over the same period. Breaking these numbers down by states shows uneven trends, with the difference in shares of high-propensity business applications in 2005 and 2023 decreasing by over 20 percentage points in most states.

While the growth of female-founded and co-founded companies has increased at a faster rate than those of male-founded and co-founded and mixed gender founded companies, it is still a smaller amount than the other two. Additionally, these companies are more likely to receive a higher proportion of deals occurring earlier in the VC pipeline.

Since 2014, companies founded or co-founded by a female have increased by the largest amount of any gender combination. Sixty percent of these founders have received a venture capital (VC) deal, according to SSTI analysis of PitchBook data. Across both male- and female-founded or co-founded companies, this figure drops to a relatively lower 29%, while those founded or co-founded by a male have increased 24% over the same period.

The measurements for success of female-founded and female-co-founded companies, while improving, remain lower than male-founded companies in number, deal count, and capital invested, according to PitchBook’s 2023 Annual US VC Valuations Report. PitchBook found that female-only-founded startups received just 2% of all venture capital (VC) dollars in 2023, while those female-co-founded reached 21% that year—a record high. SSTI analysis of PitchBook data finds that the number of VC deals to female-founded and female-cofounded companies has increased 58% over the past decade, yet despite reaching that milestone, they have been on a sharp downward trend since 2021.

Shrinking shares of job-creating, high-growth firms across the country, the topic of SSTI’s Useful Stats column in last week’s Digest, is not being experienced within all sectors of the economy, according to analysis of the Business Dynamics Statistics of High Growth Firms (BDS-HG) experimental dataset from the Census Bureau. From 1978-2021, the number of high-growth firms, measured by change in employment, has increased in five sectors, stayed the same in one, and decreased in the remaining 13 classifications of U.S. business and industrial activity. Slower-growth firms expanded their dominance of the economy, as all sectors experienced a decrease in the number of high-growth firms as a percentage of their total respective firms.

High-growth firms are often conflated with all other firms. Unfortunately, this tendency makes it extremely difficult to differentiate those with a higher likelihood of significantly impacting the economy and innovation. While reports like the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) have found increasing rates of entrepreneurship over the past decade, barring a drop at the onset of the pandemic, new U.S. Census Bureau data on high-growth firms reveals the opposite for the number of high-growth firms, with steady, significant decreases in the number and share of high-growth firms across the nation.

This article, including the downloadable data sheet, visuals, and analysis, was updated on July 10th, 2024, to include new data from Treasury’s SSBCI Capital Program Summaries.

This article was edited on April 4th, 2024, to correct for an error in, and add to, the original data. Refer to the note at the bottom of this article for more detail.

Information on the geographic distribution of innovation and entrepreneurship is not easy to tease out of many federal statistical data sets, leading regional policy often to be based on trends in all business starts or life span and size—ignoring the fact that some firms have greater impact on regional economic growth than others. The U.S. Census Bureau is well aware of the challenge and, earlier this week, released an experimental data set that allows for an examination of state-level long-term trends in the change in high-growth firms and establishments across the nation.

The data set, titled “The Business Dynamics Statistics of High Growth Firms,” with the acronym of BDS-HG, covers key economic data on high-growth firms with metrics such as the number of firms and establishments, job creation and destruction, employment, and growth rates. It extends the statistics published by the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) program with a focus on high-growth companies.

The real gross domestic product (GDP) of private industries has steadily increased nationwide from 2018-2022, with an average percentage increase of 2% each year, or 9% total, despite a drop from 2019-2020 due to the pandemic. However, the same cannot be said across all private industries; of the 14 broad industries captured by U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data,[1] eight have grown while six decreased over the five-year period from 2018-2022.

While a prior SSTI Useful Stats article went in depth about overall state-level industry GDP profiles using BEA data, this edition of Useful Stats explores all U.S. counties, identifying trends and clustering across the nation’s private industries through a more granular lens.

Total postsecondary enrollment is down 5% from fall 2019 to fall 2023 due to a 6% drop in undergraduate students. While undergraduates are down, graduate students have surpassed pre-pandemic enrollment numbers by 4%. Enrollments in undergraduate and graduate certificates are up significantly from pre-pandemic values (16% and 21%), while enrollment in associate degrees are down more than any other undergraduate credential (-14%). Continue reading for a national and state-level analysis of the recently released fall 2023 enrollment estimates from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (Clearinghouse).

Graduate student enrollment and postdoctoral appointments have shifted in fields of study over the past decades, with many fields exploding in graduate enrollment and postdoctoral appointments. Computer and information sciences graduate students jumped from just 4% of all science enrollments in 1975 to nearly a quarter of the total by 2021, while engineering postdocs in biological, biomedical, and biosystems engineering jumped 5,671%– increasing from 3% in 1975 to 19% of all engineering postdocs by 2021. This edition of Useful Stats uses the full range of NSF GSS data to explore trends in graduate students (1975-2021) and postdoctoral appointees (1979-2021; postdocs) in science and engineering.

Methodological nuances and year-by-year changes can be found on the GSS survey page.

The number of graduate students in science, engineering, and health has grown from approximately 328,000 to 760,000 from 1975 to 2021, a 132% increase, according to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering (GSS). When compared to a 60% increase (from 9.7 to 15.4 million) in total undergraduate enrollment across all fields of study over the same time period, the scale of growth can be better seen. However, while the number of graduate students in science has seen an upward trend over the 46-year period, the number of graduate students in engineering has stagnated since 2014.