Kent State continues to maintain steady enrollment numbers of over 4,000 students this fall semester, marking a new average for the university.

Following the release of Kent’s 15th-day enrollment numbers this September, 4,023 new students enrolled on the Kent Campus. Despite a 1% decrease compared to last year’s figures, this marks the fourth freshman class in the past five years to maintain a 4,000-student average.

Since 2021, regional campuses have also experienced one of their largest increases in freshman students, with more than 1,300 new students enrolling for the fall. In total, there are 24,930 students on the Kent Campus and 33,319 students across all regional campuses combined.

However, numbers for the university’s overall enrollment have gone down slightly across the board by 2%, including transfer students and international freshmen students. This is not a cause for concern, though, Sean Broghammer, vice president for enrollment management, said. 

“As an overall university, our undergraduate population remains steady or flat with last year,” Broghammer said. “We had grown the last few years, so the good news is we’re really coming out of the pandemic, and built back, and really felt that we’ve stabilized our undergraduate student population.” 

International students have also had a dip in numbers this fall, with 400 students down from last year. This is in part due to international graduate students completing their master’s programs, but also because of visa issues challenging students from coming to the United States, Broghammer said. 

Fewer graduate students enrolling is something the university saw coming, Broghammer said. 

“We had a pretty good expectation for what would happen this year, I think it’s just compounding with a lower freshman class and the new international student challenges that just complied and made that a little more difficult,” Broghammer said. 

The Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship and the College of Aeronautics and Engineering had record-setting numbers, with both having their largest enrollment of freshmen students yet. The College of Architecture took second place, with the College of Nursing in third. 

“Last year was a record-setting year, over 500 freshmen, and this year was higher than that,” Deborah Spake, dean of the Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship, said.

Spake believes the new building, now the largest academic building on campus, is helping to increase student enrollment as well. The new building allows the space for technology the old one did not have. 

“We have a sales program, and we have dedicated sales training labs so students can prepare for competitions that they participate in around sales,” Spake said. “We didn’t have that previously in our old building.”

Kent’s College Credit Plus program also saw a 6% increase from last year, now at 3,875 high school students. 

Sascha Aleksich is a beat reporter. Contact her at [email protected].