FSU’s 2015 Freshman Class Not Affected by Smaller Number of High School Graduates

Recently, the need for University System of Maryland schools to compete for high school seniors in Maryland has become a much harder job than in years past as fewer seniors choose to pursue a college career.

According to Wiche.Edu, “Maryland’s period of rapid growth began in the early 1990s and continued uninterrupted until 2007-08, capping out at almost 68,900 graduates. The state is now projected to be in a period of decline that will be slight in some years and more steep in others, and will bottom out 10% lower, at around 61,000, between 2016-17 and 2018-19.”

While the class of 2019 has been chosen and students are now at different schools all around Maryland, that does not answer if FSU brought in a lower then expected number of freshman and if these numbers were smaller or larger than in years past. Wray Blair, associate provost for enrollment management gave an inside look at how FSU’s 2019 class stacks up against previous years and other schools.

“This year we have 933 official freshman,” said Blair. “We had 961 last year, but 933 is still larger than the three years before last.”

When Blair was asked about some of the difficulties that the university had this year with recruitment, he was not afraid to address a larger issue that all Maryland colleges are facing. According to Blair, “the number of high school graduates are dropping in Maryland and this decline in graduating high school students have caused more fierce competition between colleges in Maryland.”

Although there are less graduating students in Maryland to choose from, Blair remains confident with FSU’s recruitment tactics and claimed that those tactics are what is keeping FSU from losing to its competition. “We tried very hard to communicate with this freshman class,” Blair said.

“We used social media, email, and phone calls, all in an effort to stay in touch with the class of 2019 and it definitely paid off when comparing our class to other schools,” he added. When Blair was asked about what stood out about this class he stated that the class of 2019 in particular is “very diverse” and have shown “more excitement than in years past.”

When asked about if tuition was a big issue for students on deciding if FSU was a good choice, Blair stated that tuition was where FSU shined.

“A lot of students worry about college cost,” Blair said.” However, our students at FSU find a great value and that is one of the reasons why I think our freshman class is beating the Maryland odds.”