OU posts record enrollment

Ohio University will have its all-time highest enrollment this year, with the Athens campus expected to top 21,000, the university announced late last week when releasing preliminary figures.

Despite the recession gripping Ohio and the nation, enrollment is up at OU across the board, the release stated.

"All told, Ohio University is the largest and best it has ever been," said Craig Cornell, vice provost for enrollment management. "We've seen growth in every college and regional campus, undergraduate numbers and graduate numbers."

This is particularly good news when considered in light of the concerns raised last winter regarding the credit crisis and how it would affect the cost and availability of student loans. At one point, officials at OU and elsewhere across the country were worried that a lack of credit would put downward pressure on enrollment at colleges across the country this fall. That obviously didn't happen at OU.

The OU Class of 2013 has more than 4,075 students, an increase of about 2.5 percent from last year. Total preliminary enrollment across all campuses is at more than 31,700. This figure is up by approximately 2,050 students, or 6.8 percent. The largest increase occurred on the university's five regional campuses, with an overall increase of 1,300 students, or more than 16 percent.

Cornell said that the university also saw a record number of applications this year, with 14,200.

With figures still changing every day, Cornell said, exact numbers are not yet available.

"There's lots of records," Cornell said. "It's a record for our undergraduate students here in Athens. It's a record at the Athens campus. It's a record for overall enrollment for all campuses."

The record numbers result from a number of contributing factors, he said, including the strong freshman class, and a 1 percent increase in the retention rate. A university's retention rate is the percentage of freshmen that return for their sophomore year.

"So we went from 80 to 81 percent, and that actually is a jump of even the year before that," Cornell said. "The students who are coming are staying. We have larger numbers coming into the system. And last year was a record year too (as was the year before), so we're kind of continuing to beat our own records as we bring in strong classes and students are staying."

Cornell said that these increases represent the smooth growth that the university is seeking, as opposed to large spikes in growth.

"That's what we want to see," he said. "We want to see a quality group of students who come here and have access to this institution and are successful. And that's what we're seeing."

But the university is still making sure it has the resources to properly provide for the increasing student population, he added.

"We're definitely looking at our capacities and taking that into consideration when we think about future growth," he said. "We actually have several committees looking into all of our capacities here on campus to make sure we can continue to grow, or what is the right balance to make sure students are successful."

While the increases in enrollment numbers might lead some to believe that the university is being less selective, Cornell pointed to the ACT figures for incoming freshmen. Even with the increase of students, the average ACT score of incoming freshmen rose slightly, standing at 23.76 compared with 23.73 last year.

"We had a record number of applications," Cornell said. "And we were able to admit even more students this year because we had such a strong pool. Even though we had more students that applied, we had a lot more highly qualified students that applied. So that allowed us to go a little bit heavier on our admit rate."

In a lot of senses, Cornell said, the university didn't need to be much more selective to bring up the ACT average because of the strength of the pool.

"One of the greatest things Ohio University does is takes students to a level that they're not predicted to go," he said.

Cornell pointed to OU's status as third in the nation according to U.S. News and World Report for predicted graduation rate.

"The transformation that occurs for our students here on campus as students transform their lives through the academic programs we have, and extracurricular activities that they experience even shoots it beyond that," Cornell said. "Even though they come in highly qualified with a very strong ACT, they're going to be able to do even more than they expected. And we're excited about that."

This summer, the university made a number of recruitment efforts that Cornell said he thinks helped make for a record number of applicants.

"That's what we do, but it doesn't matter how great your recruitment efforts are, if students aren't successful and if they're not happy, and if the academics are not strong, then they're not going to come," he said. "Our academic reputation is what drives it. It makes the recruitment process a lot easier when you have the strength of the academic reputation that we have behind it."