The world needs more Cowboys and, according to the rise in enrollment, it just got a lot more. There are 1,859 new students this fall semester making this year the largest freshman class in UW history. The record before that was set in 2008 with 1,697 first-year students enrolled in the university. When UW first started in September of 1886 it was built in the territory known as Wyoming since it did not become a state until 1890. At the start of the university there were 42 students and 5 faculty members, both male and female combined making the state later known as “The Equality State.”
“Our enrollment strategy continues to focus on students from both inside and outside the state — whether they come here straight from high school, from our outstanding community college partners or from the workforce,” Moore said in a recent press release. “This is a broad-based, collaborative effort built on a foundation of commitment to each student’s success.”
To determine the total student population at the university a census was conducted after the first few weeks of the 2018-2019 academic school year. It showed exactly how much the University of Wyoming had grown since the last academic year. There was a 9.5 percent increase in freshman enrollment specifically from last year when there were 1,696 new freshmen, which was a 9.3 percent increase from the academic year of 2016-2017 before that. Dates like the add and drop deadlines, payment plan installments and the last day to drop out of classes altogether influenced when the census was conducted. This timeline gave the best representation for the study.
“Two straight years of nearly double-digit growth in freshman recruitment show that the University of Wyoming is no longer one of the nation’s best-kept secrets in the world of higher education,” said UW’s associate vice provost for enrollment management Kyle Moore in a recent press release. “Very few institutions across the country are seeing increases of this magnitude, and we are delighted that so many students from Wyoming and beyond have chosen to become Cowboys.”
The increased freshman population this year is primarily due to the large number of nonresidential students, 944 exactly, who attend this fall. That is a 22.4 percent increase from last years 771 nonresidential students. The states where these nonresidential students generally come from are Colorado, California, Illinois and Nebraska.
The amount of undergraduate and graduate students in general experienced growth for the university. Total enrollment was 12,397 last fall but has now grown to accommodate 12,450 students. However, the graduate students had a slight decline in their specific enrollment, which kept the University of Wyoming from becoming too large to accommodate all of its students. The specific number of graduate students this year is 2,452 as opposed to last years 2,606.
The university has a strategic plan called “Breaking Through: 2017-2022,” which will hopefully increase the enrollment for undergraduates and graduates combined to reach 13,500 by the fall of 2022. Cowboy nation is slowly but surely growing with persistent leaders taking every measure to recruit students from around the globe.
