Kansas City-area colleges and universities are welcoming a record number of students this semester.
Official census numbers will take a few more weeks to come in, but schools are already seeing a boost to enrollment that brings the institutions back to pre-pandemic levels — and in some cases, the largest number of incoming students in history.
The University of Missouri-Kansas City just ushered in its biggest-ever freshman class with more than 1,350 students. That’s the second year in a row the university has broken its enrollment record.
William Jewell College, Rockhurst University, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Johnson County Community College are also celebrating record-high student numbers.
Doug Swink, UMKC's assistant vice provost for enrollment management, attributes their success to its work communicating with students and making the campus more of a destination. He says that UMKC communicates with students through text, email and apps to keep them connected to the school, and make incoming students aware of the university.
And two years ago, UMKC made college free to all Pell Grant-eligible students from Missouri and Kansas through its Roo Advantage Scholarship. Those students make up more than half of its freshman class.
“It's really changing how we tell our story and how we're connecting students who enroll here with our community,” Swink said. “Students are entering an institution now thinking about being career ready day one. They need to make sure they understand they're going to have a job when they get out of school and have these resources and connections through internships and things like that.”
Swink said UMKC is also working to make sure people don’t just think of it as a commuter school. The university has built more housing and worked to beautify their Kansas City campus — by adding things like Adirondack chairs and outdoor work spaces, and remodeling its library space — to make students want to stay on campus.
William Jewell College welcomed more than 320 new students to campus in Liberty, Missouri, in August. The class of 2028 is the school’s largest group of freshmen since 2014.
Jewell’s overall enrollment has grown from fewer than 700 students in 2019 to more than 950 this year — representing student decline that started a decade ago but has reversed in the past few years.
The school attributes its success to significantly lowering tuition in 2020, creating new degree programs in line with student demand, recruiting students from further away thanks to the addition of sports like lacrosse and a focus on diversity. The latter effort has increased Jewell’s student diversity by about 11% in the past four years.
The college recently dedicated four bronze plaques called the Freedom Walk and debuted a choral work called “The Canon for Racial Reconciliation.” The initiatives are part of the school’s Racial Reconciliation Commission — a group created to research and acknowledge the school’s racist past and history with slavery after a student group, the Slavery, Memory, and Justice Project, was created with that intent in 2020.
At the University of Missouri-Columbia, enrollment rose in all areas. The school saw a 16% increase in the freshman class from last year, with nearly 6,000 new students.
Not just freshman
Schools are also making gains with their returning student body and transfers.
At Johnson County Community College, enrollment numbers have nearly reached pre-COVID levels. Returning credit and previous student enrollment is up 6% from last year, with more than 8,600 students returning.
Rockhurst University had a record summer enrollment, up 27% from last year, thanks to graduate and transfer students. That success has continued into the fall, where graduate enrollment is up 5% and transfer enrollment is up 8%.
Nursing is Rockhurst's most popular major, and it’s seeing growth in both its online Master of Science in Nursing degree. This year, the school’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing program is back to full capacity for the first time since the onset of COVID.
Todd Hopkins, Rockhurst’s director of graduate and transfer admission, says the school is focusing more on graduate and transfer students thanks to the record class sizes, but isn't abandoning incoming freshmen.
“We've actually doubled down and increased our marketing not just to the high school seniors, but we're doing now more with juniors, sophomores and freshmen,” Hopkins said. “We're also revisiting our value proposition and targeting the students who want more of a smaller, more intimate setting for college.”
This year’s FAFSA student aid form delays meant some students are still waiting on their student aid packages. That hurt Rockhurst’s freshman admissions.
Hopkins says many students with lower GPAs didn’t qualify for high-dollar merit scholarships. With the delay in student aid processing, many of those students decided to attend more affordable state schools.
Some of those students may have ended up at UMKC. Swink believes the school’s handling of the FAFSA delay helped enrollment. The school’s financial aid team worked to get financial aid offers out by April and hosted affordability sessions over the summer so prospective students could better understand how much college would cost.
“Students had no idea what was happening because things were so delayed and offers were out so late that they were really trying to kind of make decisions right at the 11th hour on where to go,” Swink said.
Hopkins says Rockhurst is working to make its education equitable to all students by offering larger scholarships and ensuring undocumented students can study at Rockhurst for little to no cost.
The increase in enrollment is helping the school continue to be a destination for people who struggle to go to college — and ensures the school will be financially healthy enough moving forward to continue to do so.
“Enrollment is necessary to remain as a school from year to year,” Hopkins said. “So we're always going to be focused on our enrollment numbers. For us, it means, of course, surviving from year to year. But it also goes back to our mission as a school where we're really in the city for good.”
