Across all campuses OU is predicted to have approximately 39,000 students this year.
Year after year, Ohio University has broken enrollment records. It’s happened again, but this time it’s not limited to just first-year students.
Total enrollment across all OU campuses will be about 39,000 this year, breaking previous enrollment records, said Craig Cornell, vice provost for enrollment management, to the Board of Trustees during its meeting on Thursday in Dublin, Ohio.
“We’re anticipating passing the 39,000 mark for all these populations,” Cornell said.
Cornell said in his presentation that the freshman class on the Athens campus is the largest the university has seen in its history with 4,394 students — with about 150 more students than last year’s freshman class, or an increase of 3.5 percent.
The class is so large that Residential Housing did not have enough space for all students. Housing resorted to placing some in rooms with resident assistants and converting rooms designed as triples, but currently being used as doubles, back to their original capacity, The Post previously reported.
The incoming freshman class is also expected to set new records for in-state, multi-cultural, Appalachian counties and first generation students, and had the highest high school grade point average for any freshman class in the university's history.
Of the new class, 1,064 students, 24 percent of the whole class, are first generation college students — the most since the university started tracking that demographic in 2010.
“These really show the access to the institution,” Cornell said.
The total undergraduate student population for the Athens campus is about 17,288, an increase of 1.9 percent from last year.
All numbers are preliminary based on enrollment from Monday, the first day of class. Cornell said he and his team will reassess the numbers at the end of the second week of class to get an official number.
President Roderick McDavis and David BrightBill, the board’s chairman, were both pleased with the increases.
"When many universities are holding on or going down in student enrollment, we're going up," McDavis said.
"It's not only a large class but it's a class that ... gets our mission and gets the mission of access," Brightbill said.
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