Maine Perspective Front Page
UMaine Enrollment Continues to Increase
The enrollment picture at the University of Maine continues to brighten, with confirmations for fall enrollment currently running 21 percent ahead of last year's pace.
Officials report that so far, 583 new students have confirmed their intention to enroll at UMaine in September, putting the incoming class of first-year students on a pace to enroll the largest class in nearly a decade. This time last year, 483 students had confirmed their enrollment for fall, with a total of 1,451 first-year students eventually enrolling by the time school started.
"I am delighted and gratified that more and more students are seeing the University of Maine as their college of choice, a place where they can get a superior education at a reasonable cost," says UMaine President Peter Hoff. "This growth comes while we maintain the same increased academic standards that were adopted a few years ago.
"People continue to learn more about the excellence of our teaching, research and outreach work," Hoff says. "Students and their families are recognizing the unique and complete student life experience they can find at UMaine."
The class that enrolled in September 1998 was 23 percent larger than its predecessor.
"If this trend continues through the end of the summer, and we have every reason to believe it will, we will have moved significantly closer to building UMaine's overall enrollment to more than 11,000 students," says John Beacon, UMaine's dean of Enrollment Management.
UMaine's fall 1998 enrollment was 9,415 students, which represented an increase over the previous year and a reversal of a trend toward declining enrollments at New England colleges and universities. Approximately two-thirds of UMaine students are currently full-time students and nearly 80 percent are from Maine.
Reasons for the increase in enrollment include a more intensive effort to reach out to prospective students, especially high achieving ones, and to call attention to the University as a high-quality academic institution with small classes and close personal attention from front-line professors who care deeply about student learning.
In addition, Hoff has been making personal visits to schools around the state, promoting educational aspirations and the pursuit of higher education.