By David Jesse
U-M limits freshmen but still sees growth
Despite intentionally shrinking its entering class of freshmen, the University of Michigan posted a 1.7% increase in total enrollment this year, numbers released Tuesday show.
Overall, U-M has 43,426 students at its Ann Arbor campus. That’s up 710 students from last fall. Total undergraduate enrollment grew by 572 students, or 2.1%, U-M said in a news release. However, the freshman class shrank by 80 students over last fall, despite U-M having 42,544 applications for the 6,171 slots. The number of applications is a record.
“This is the second consecutive year that we have intentionally admitted fewer students to our entering class,” said Ted Spencer, associate vice provost and executive director of undergraduate admissions. “Our goal is to maintain fairly stable enrollment numbers overall. This ensures that enrollment is scaled to resources, which optimizes the educational environment for all our students.”
The university extended 15,551 offers of admissions, 522 fewer than last year. The 2012 freshman class is almost statistically even in gender, with 3,083 (49.96%) women and 3,088 (50.04%) men. U-M said underrepresented minority freshmen constitute 10% of the incoming class, a decrease from the prior year, in which they accounted for 10.5% of the incoming class.
U-M is one of eight Michigan universities to post enrollment growth this fall. Most of the universities are relatively flat in their enrollment, with losses in the 1%-2% range. The exception is Lake Superior State University, which lost 9.5% of its enrollment, down to 2,489. Eastern Michigan University and Oakland University tied for the largest percentage increase, at 1.9%.
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