Iowa State University’s fall 2018 enrollment is the fourth largest in university history with a total of 34,992 students.

This is the first year a new method of counting total enrollment was used. The method was adopted by the State of Iowa Board of Regents and also impacts how the University of Iowa and University of Northern Iowa report their enrollment numbers.

According to a press release, the new method “no longer includes 351 postdocs, 32 students enrolled in the Intensive English and Orientation Program and approximately 60 students enrolled in the summer trial program, who were counted in previous years.”

Dr. Martino Harmon, senior vice president for student affairs, believes that Iowa State has had “healthy” enrollment and is proud of the students who attend the university. While fall 2017 enrollment was slightly more with 35,993 students, Harmon says the university has still put a lot of effort into recruiting new students.

“We’re not doing any less recruiting at all, in fact we always are continuously exploring new opportunities and creative programming in terms of recruitment,” Harmon said. “We also know that there are factors outside of the university which impact enrollment.”

Iowa State’s admission office has similar focus regarding healthy student enrollment.

“Our priority is not to grow, our priority is really to maintain healthy, new student enrollments,” said Katharine Johnson Suski, director of admissions. “When we maintain healthy new student enrollment it allows us to serve customers better, to serve our students better and to provide a better experience for them through the process.”

This year, the incoming freshman class contains 6,047 students. Of those students, 1,449 are first generation college students. This freshman class also has the highest-ever average high school GPA for an incoming Iowa State class of 3.64, according to the press release.

“We’re really excited about the new direct from high school [students] and the fact that we’re up over 6,000. We had not been over 6,000 in a couple years and we’re 103 students more than last fall, so that’s really really exciting,” Harmon said.

From last year’s class of freshmen, Johnson Suski said that they achieved their first year retention goal of a 87.5 percent rate.

In-state residents make up more than half of Iowa State’s enrollment. 3,362 Iowans are in the freshman class and 19,022 Iowans attend the university overall. For undergraduates, 59.2 percent are in-state students.

“Especially as a land grant institution, that’s really our mission, to support students and support our young people staying here in Iowa getting their education and getting employed in Iowa,” Johnson Suski said.

Within total enrollment, all 99 Iowa counties and all 50 U.S states, in addition to Washington D.C, Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands and Mariana Islands, are represented. Additionally, there are students from 126 countries, according to the press release.

U.S. Multicultural Student (African American, Latinx, Native American and Pacific Islander) enrollment broke records this year with an increase in undergraduate and freshman students. Harmon credits this raise with new multicultural recruitment programs and scholarships.

“Last year I believe was the first year that we had a change in our visit programs where we had a program that was called multicultural student visit day,” Harmon said. “We always had a program for multicultural students who received scholarships and it was sort of feeding into our large visit day, Experience Iowa State, but this past year we had a specific program on a certain day that was geared at multicultural students.”

These days are called Multicultural Student Experience days, which are full open houses for multicultural students that involve the whole campus.

The growth in multicultural students this year is “due to resident growth in resident multicultural students specifically,” Johnson Suski said.

The growth this year in multicultural students was solely in Iowa Residents, Johnson Suski said. She said this can be attributed to the multicultural outreach the team has done, such as the Multicultural Student Experience days.

“The fact that it’s all Iowans, is where the growth is, is just really unique this year and really exciting,” Johnson Suski said.

Of the total enrollment, 29,621 are undergraduate students, which is “the largest number of undergraduates enrolled at any Iowa college or university,” according to the press release.

Over the last decade total undergraduate enrollment has steadily increased. However, the trend was broken with undergraduates decreasing from a total enrollment of 30,406 last year.

For the first time in twelve years, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences dropped slightly, going from 5,333 last fall to an enrollment of 5,083 this year. Similarly, the College of Engineering, which is the largest college on campus, went from an enrollment of 9,669 in 2017 to a total of 9,530 this year.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is the second largest college with 8,035 students this year.

There are 4,931 students enrolled in the College of Business, 4,385 in The College of Human Sciences, and 1,928 in the College of Design.

According to the press release, this year’s enrollment follows national trends such as “a decline in international enrollment, record graduation rates, and smaller incoming classes replacing large graduating classes.” Throughout the country, international student enrollment is declining, which Harmon believes has to do with the “national political landscape.”

“International students may be concerned about whether or not immigration policy might change, so we knew international [student enrollment] would be down. We have done some new initiatives to maximize opportunities for international students,” Harmon said.

Despite the overall slight decline in enrollment, Harmon is looking forward to continuing recruitment initiatives.

“There [are] certain things in the environment and the landscape we anticipated so our enrollment was just where we thought it would be,” Harmon said. “We’ve got a lot to celebrate.”