The University of Iowa’s freshman class.

The presidents of the three state universities reported on fall enrollment during the Board of Regents meeting today in Iowa City.

University of Iowa president Bruce Harreld talked to the board about the 5,029 new students.

“Last year I promised the University of Iowa would look at how we would purposely reduce our incoming class to ensure that we have significant resources to positively impact student outcomes,” Harreld says. “We successfully managed that this year and I am pleased with the way our admissions team has done in….executing the new student-focused strategy.”

The incoming class is the third largest ever for the school. “And while we reduced the size of the class, we maintained our goal of having at least 20% of the incoming class be first-generation students,” Harreld says. Almost 58% of the incoming class are Iowa residents. The U-I’s total enrollment this fall is 33,564 students — which is up 230.

Iowa State University also tried to slow what has been years of record enrollment growth. Interim ISU president Ben Allen says enrollment did drop slightly.

“This fall we welcomed 36,000 plus students — marking the second largest enrollment in school history. Our enrollment includes 19,843 Iowans, which represents 55 percent of our student body,” Allen says. Total enrollment at ISU is 36,321 — or 339 below last year’s fall enrollment.

Allen says the number of international students fell by 16 from last year’s record.”Our international students also represent more countries than every before. We have students this year from a record number, 127 countries,” according to Allen” He says the freshman class dropped by 381.

“Our 2017 freshman class is just shy of six-thousand students, including nearly 3,200 Iowa residents,” Allen says. Iowa residents make up nearly 55 percent of the overall student body in Ames.

University of Northern Iowa President Mark Nook says his school saw a very small increase.

“Our fall FTE is 11,907. We are up two FTE — so we are essentially even with last year,” Nook says. “We are down in our undergraduates, but up by a similar amount in graduates. We actually have a record enrollment in the graduate college, which is something we have been working for to improve graduate enrollments.”

He says they set a second enrollment record.

“We also have a record number of non-resident freshman. Most of these are coming from the state of Illinois, but also Minnesota and Missouri and bordering states in particular,” Nook says. There was a 33% increase in new freshmen from Illinois.

Photos courtesy of UNI, and U-I.