2002 Progress Report

Recruitment & Retention of Students

Enrollment Management

Strong increases in enrollment continued in 2002. With 2,440 new freshman students enrolled for fall 2002, the target (by admission status) of 2,200 was exceeded. The target of 2,200 for transfer students was not reached with 2,090 students enrolling. New graduate and professional student numbers of 2,270 exceeded their target of 1,900. An additional 3,550 new students enrolled during spring and summer 2002. A record student headcount of 27,500 was recorded in fall 2002, with over 1,790 more students than in fall 2001. Table 1 provides enrollment trends.

Diversity of the new students continues to be a distinctive feature of the university. Not only do we continue to recruit a highly ethnically diverse student body while significantly increasing our admission requirements, we also are in the top ten universities nationally for numbers of black students who graduate [Black Issues in Higher Education, June 2002, lists Georgia State as 7th nationally and 1st in non-HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges & Universities)]. Table 2 provides data on student diversity. Our ability to attract Latino students in the future has been enhanced with the award in November 2002 of a $1.5 million grant from the Goizueta Foundation.

Fall 2002 saw a continued increased quality of new freshmen. Quality of the new freshman class was our highest on record with an average SAT score of 1071, an increase of 11 points from last fall. More targeted use of presidential assistantships to students with a minimum FI of 2700 increased the number of students with high FI scores. Similarly, the average GPA for transfer students was the highest on record with 2.91. Table 3 indicates increase in quality of admitted students.

Credit hour targets were also significantly exceeded. Summer enrollment was up substantially for the first time since semester conversion with an increase of over 14,000 credit hours to 107,000. For fall 2002, over 298,000 credit hours surpassed our previous highest total that occurred last year by 25,000. The average number of credit hours per student increased to 10.9 for fall 2002 from 10.6 in fall 2001.

One-year retention rates continued to increase in fall 2002. One-year retention rates increased to 81.0% for the fall 2001 class, an increase of six percentage points over the previous year. Two-year retention rates for the class of 2000 were 63.9%, 2.3% points higher than the previous year. Table 4 shows increases in freshman to sophomore retention rates and targets for years through 2006.

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