Iowa’s three state universities are expecting to set record enrollments, or come close, when students return to the campuses later this month. University of Northern Iowa President, Bill Ruud told the Board or Regents Wednesday that they are continuing to make progress in erasing recent enrollment declines.
“As of August 1st, the number of students applying to UNI is up 27-percent. The number of students admitted to UNI is up 18-percent compared to last year,” Ruud says. “We haven’t stopped there, we’ve also been looking forward to FY 2015 by reaching out to students who will be seniors in high school this fall through our senior search campaign and we already have admitted — as of today — more than 600 students for the fall of 2015.”
Iowa State University president, Stephen Leath, says they are projecting a slight increase of last year. “We expect more than 34,000 of them. And we had a record of 5,600 students take part in our summer orientation program,” Leath says. University of Iowa president, Sally Mason, didn’t give specific numbers, but says the freshman class looks to be the largest ever.
Mason says they are finishing up the flood clean up to be ready for the returning students. “The building projects that were impacted by the flood were actually not significantly impacted by the flood — that’s the good news from our standpoint,” Mason says. She says the project likely will not be behind schedule in any significant way.
The university put up flood barriers in anticipation that the flood waters would be a problem once again. That included sandbagging around the Mayflower dorm.
“The Mayflower will be open by the fall semester, and by next spring it will be fully protected from future floods,” Mason says. Last year’s U-I freshman class was 44-hundred, down slightly from the previous fall, and total enrollment fell behind Iowa State to 31,000. Official enrollment figures will be released after classes get underway.