UB enrollment again tops 30,000

UB saw another record enrollment this fall, topping 30,000 students for the third straight year.

The number of students on the North, South and Downtown campuses reached 30,523 for the fall semester of the 2021-22 academic year, according to Lee Melvin, vice provost for enrollment management. That includes 20,006 undergraduates and 10,517 graduate students.

Total enrollment at UB is 32,337 when including UB students in Singapore and in the graduate program in India.

Those figures align with the objectives of President Satish K. Tripathi, who set university-wide goals in 2015 to raise the academic profile of incoming students, broaden the diversity among the student body and grow enrollment by 2,000 students.

“We set an enrollment goal to enroll 30,000 by 2020. We achieved that goal in 2019 and we’re sustaining that enrollment,” Melvin says.

This fall, UB added a strong, more diverse first-year class of 4,179 students seeking degrees, Melvin says.

“Our freshman class of over 4,100 students is highly qualified and academically talented. Our student body is more diverse than previous years with more students of color, women and international students,” says Provost A. Scott Weber.

UB also saw a significant increase in graduate students, whose numbers rose by nearly 9% from last fall. A large majority of the graduate academic units experienced an increase in enrollment.

Melvin attributes UB’s enrollment increase to several factors, including its recruiting efforts, the depth and breadth of its programs, and the overall reputation of the university to attract students from across the region, New York State and the world.

UB came in as the No. 1 public university in New York, and No. 31 in the United States on the recent Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings. UB also was ranked No. 38 among public universities nationwide this year by U.S News & World Report.

Shaping a freshman class at UB was different this year with the introduction of test-optional admissions policies for SUNY schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, more than a third of UB freshmen submitted their scores for an average SAT of 1280. The average grade point average of this year’s freshman class was 92.

Other characteristics of this year’s incoming class:

• Enrollment is up among historically underrepresented students, who now comprise one-fifth of the first-year class. The number of Black freshman students increased 12% from last year, while the number of Hispanic/Latinx freshman students grew 1%.

“Our record enrollment this year translates into historic enrollment for our underrepresented students,” Melvin notes.

• Enrollment is up 1.5% from last year among first-year female students.
• Twenty-nine percent of freshmen are from Western New York, more than 10% are either from out of state or international, and the rest are from across New York.

Overall, UB also saw a sizeable bump among all international students, whose numbers rose by 852 from last fall to a total of 4,463.

“A majority of international students could not travel to the U.S. last year and deferred their admission to this year,” Melvin explains.