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YSU’s fall enrollment declines by 844 students
YOUNGSTOWN
Youngstown State University’s final fall enrollment is 844 fewer students than in the 2013 fall semester, but it’s an improvement over this fall’s preliminary number.
The university’s preliminary fall enrollment number, taken Aug. 19, the day before classes started, was 12,227. It increased by 324 to 12,551 on Wednesday, the 14th day of the semester, which is considered to be the day of the official enrollment count.
“Our number was a little more favorable compared to what it was before class started,” said Gary Swegan, associate vice president for enrollment planning and management.
It was a 6.3 percent enrollment decline compared with the start of the fall 2013 semester with 13,395 students.
There were two major reasons for the decline from last fall, Swegan said.
One was YSU’s decision last October to no longer accept every student through open enrollment, he said.
“The decline is with the lower-end students,” several of whom drop out before graduating, Swegan said. “This was a larger [decline] than anticipated. We thought it would be 2.5 percent to 3 percent” because of the open-enrollment change.
The other reason was YSU had 2,147 students graduate in the last school year, which is 84 more than the previous school year, and the most to graduate from the university since at least 1989, he said.
While this is the fourth consecutive year YSU has had an enrollment drop for its fall semester, this year’s freshman class has the highest level of academic achievement in the school’s history, Swegan said.
The freshman class of 1,734 students had a high school grade-point average of 3.12 and an average ACT score of 21.09. In 2013, the GPA was 2.97 with a 20.48 ACT score.
The school’s highest enrollment in recent years was 15,194 in 2010, but the graduation rate of “lower-end students” that year and around that time was very low, Swegan said.
While the university wants to reverse its trend of declining enrollment, Swegan said the quality of the students at YSU is improving.