While appearing on Sheridan Media’s Public Pulse program, University of Wyoming Director of Institutional Communications Chad Baldwin told listeners the number of first-time students attending UW has grown by over 10% this fall. According to Baldwin, this is the second year in a row that UW’s incoming class has topped the previous year’s enrollment.
Baldwin and UW leadership hope this is strong evidence that things are getting back to normal for institutions of higher learning after the pandemic.
C. Baldwin
Those numbers represent the first time students, but the sophomore, junior and senior classes all have declined. According to Baldwin, that’s a reflection of the significant drops in first-time enrollment in 2020-21 following the top two recruiting classes in UW’s history in 2018 and 2019 — 1,849 and 1,760, respectively — and student retention challenges related to the pandemic. Another contributing factor, community college enrollments have seen higher education’s most dramatic drops across the country during the pandemic, resulting in fewer transfer students.
Baldwin suspects that UW and other institutions will continue to see enrollment numbers return to more traditional norms as the time gap from the pandemic increases.
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Last modified: September 28, 2022
