Ohio State retains rank as nation's largest campus - 10/16/07

Columbus – The Ohio State University is again the nation's largest university with 52,568 undergraduate, graduate and professional students enrolled on the Columbus campus. This figure is 750 students higher than last autumn quarter, and surpasses main campus student enrollment at other large universities such as the University of Florida at Gainesville (51,913), Arizona State University at Tempe (51,481), University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (50,880) and the University of Texas at Austin (50,201).

When adding enrollment at its five regional campuses, Ohio State includes a total student body of more than 60,000.

University officials credit the increase in enrollment to several sources – record first-year student retention and increases in transfer students (1,513). As the academic profile of Ohio State continues to improve, so does retention. In 1994, 78 percent of freshmen continued on to their sophomore year. This year, retention is projected at a record 92.4 percent for students who enrolled a year ago.

"The fact that our students are staying and succeeding at record levels speaks volumes about the quality of our students, faculty and staff," said Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee. "While our objective isn't necessarily to be the biggest school in the country, we are pleased to be able to educate so many of our nation's future leaders."

According to official enrollment statistics recently released, approximately 80 percent of the students at Ohio State's Columbus campus are from the state of Ohio. Other states with high numbers of students here include Pennsylvania (789), New York (597), Illinois (554) and Michigan (533).

Gee says strategies and initiatives to enhance campus diversity are working and that the university will continue to seek new ways to enrich the academic and social experiences of the student body.

On the Columbus campus, minority populations account for 15.9 percent of the first-year class and 14.6 percent of the overall enrollment.

Ohio State's first-year class of 6,110 students (Columbus campus), recruited from more than 22,000 applicants, is the best academically prepared and most talented in the university's history, maintaining a trend that began 12 years ago. The average ACT score for the class was 27 and the average SAT score was 1220. Fifty-three percent were in the top 10 percent of their graduating class and 89 percent were in the top 25 percent of their class.

A record 7,623 students received their diplomas at the 2007 spring commencement, exceeding the previous record of 7,418 the previous year. Additionally, the six-year graduation rate of students who entered Ohio State in autumn 2001 is 71.2 percent compared to 55 percent for students who entered in 1990.

Additional facts follow:
•Students come from all 88 Ohio counties, 50 states/territories, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
•Students from 113 countries call themselves Buckeyes this fall. International enrollment remains steady with the largest representation from the People's Republic of China, Republic of Korea and India.
•Female students are attending Ohio State in record numbers for the second consecutive year with 29,752 enrolled throughout the entire university, representing 49.3 percent of the student body.
•Total enrollment at all Ohio State campuses is 60,347, up 2.1 percent (1,256 students) from last year. There were increases of 1.4 percent at Columbus (52,568); 10.4 percent at Lima (1,340); 6.1 percent at Mansfield (1,553); 6.2 percent at Marion (1,633); 8.4 percent at Newark (2,505); and 0.1 percent at Wooster (748).
•Hispanic students reflect an increase of 6.6 percent on the Columbus campus and reached record-high enrollment statewide (1,442) as did Asian or Pacific Islander students (2,896). African American enrollment on all campuses remained nearly the same from a year ago with 3,859 students.
•In Columbus, 287 full-time undergraduate students are between 14 and 17 years of age. Approximately 150 full-time undergraduate students are 40 years of age and older.
•On all campuses, undergraduate enrollment increased 2.8 percent to 46,690. Professional school enrollment rose 0.2 percent to 3,262, while the number of graduate students slid 0.2 percent to 10,395.
The entire enrollment report can be found at http://www.ureg.ohio-state.edu/ourweb/srs