University enrollment is down one percent for the 2007-08 school year. While that might sound concerning, SMU officials, who didn’t give a specific enrollment number, say they aren’t worried by the drop.
“There is a target that you like to hit, obviously we didn’t hit the target this year, but with the retention rate, that offsets not hitting the target,” John Kalb, director of Institutional Research said.
The retention rate of 88.6 percent is the highest it has been in the 10 years shown on the report and probably the highest it has been in a while, according to Kalb. What that means is even though the school is not bringing in the number of students it would like to, the ones that do come are staying and graduating from the university.
“The faculty would like less students because that would mean smaller classes, the financial people would like more students because that means more money,” Kalb said. “You have to find a balance between the two.”
And the balance may be found in stricter admissions requirements. Over the past few years the average SAT score has continued to increase with each incoming class.
Of the new first-year class, the class of 2011, students from Texas overwhelmingly outnumber students from any other individual state. With 568 students coming from within the state, the second highest state is California with 133 students.
And even though SMU is a small private school, a majority of the first-year class comes from public schools. However, not a large separation, with 56.8 percent coming from public schools and the remaining 43.2 percent coming from private schools.
The number of international students is not very high for the first-year class.
“We have very few first-year students that are international, there are only five countries that had more than two [students],” Kalb said.
Kalb continued to say that in order for a student to be considered an international student, they have to come from that country. If a student is not born in the United States, but holds American citizenship, then they are sorted by state.
With just 58 international first-year undergraduate students, most of them come from India, with nine students. Saudi Arabia has six students, while Guatemala, Mexico and the United Kingdom each have three.
The biggest number that they look at is the six-year rate, which is the number of students at the school every six years. That number for this past year has gone down, but the five-year rate has already seen an increase and is expected to at least hold if not increase further.
“But that was the class six years ago, the better classes started coming in when the SAT scores started going up,” Kalb said.
So while SMU may be attracting a smaller crowd, the ones who do come like what they get, and stay.
