Enrollment numbers are steady and rising for another academic year at Rhode
Island’s three public institutions for higher learning.
Both the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College expect to greet their largest freshman class in a few weeks.
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Linda Acciardo, a spokeswoman for URI, said in keeping with a goal of increasing the student population over the course of three years, the university would enroll a freshman class of about 2,600 for the second year in a row this fall.
Deborah E. Johnson, associate director of undergraduate admissions at RIC, said between transfer and freshman applications, just more than 2,000 new students will enroll at the college, according to the Office of Enrollment Services. The enrollment figures for both schools are expected to move a little as the first day of classes approach.
At the Community College of Rhode Island, where students aren’t necessarily calculated as “true” freshmen, a total of 13,615 students have enrolled for nearly 120,000 course credits. Those numbers, current as of the first week of August, break down to 5,235 full-time students at the community college, and another 8,380 part-time students.
While Acciardo said URI, like RIC, has not finalized the statistics for the incoming class, the expectation is that the makeup of the new students will closely resemble those of years past.
About 45 percent of the students will be from Rhode Island, and although freshmen are not yet required to select a major, Acciardo said communication studies and psychology continue to be fields drawing a large interest.
The incoming class also has slightly higher SAT scores, averaging around 1,119, and 24 percent of the incoming class received a Centennial Scholarship from the university.
“We’re right on track with where we want our numbers to be,” Acciardo said. The three-year population boost at the state university, adding an extra 200 students to each incoming class, will stabilize after next year.
For a second straight year, none of URI’s dormitories will come offline for renovations as the school will have about 4,300 students living in the residence halls (packed full with at least 500 tripled rooms, compared to 300 tripled rooms in the past). Of those living on campus, about 2,500 will be freshmen. The Kingston campus will serve more than 11,200 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students this fall.
The university also continues to plan new apartment-style housing for juniors and seniors to be located within the campus, on Alumni Avenue, in January 2006. Originally containing as many as 800 beds, the project now will be in the neighborhood of 500 units. Acciardo also said the applications at the university were up 2 percent, resulting in a record-breaking 14,580 applications for the freshmen class.
At Rhode Island College, Johnson said the Class of 2008 should exceed last year’s numbers, which was the college’s largest class ever.
Enrollment for the entire school will be around 9,000, exceeding last year by a few hundred.
Roughly 81 percent of the college’s students are from Rhode Island. Johnson said education and teaching programs continue to attract the majority of the school’s incoming students, though majors often change, and the school’s Center for Management and Technology (business) and pre-med programs continue to see increased enrollment.
