By SUSAN JONES
The final application and enrollments numbers are in for fall 2023 and they show increases in almost all categories on the Oakland campus, but slight decreases at the regionals, Steve Wisniewski, vice provost for budget and analytics, told the Senate Budget Policies committee on Nov. 17.
Oakland
The largest increase — 16.4 percent — came in the number of applications submitted for first-year, full-time students at the Oakland campus.
2022 applications: 53,062
2023 applications: 58,444
The target enrollment for the first-year 2023 class was 4,545. Wisniewski said this number is established through consultation with the freshman-enrolling schools.
“We go back and forth with them, what is their capacity, what does the central administration want, what do we have resources to deal with in terms of housing, lab spaces, that sort of stuff,” Wisniewski said.
The final paid number of deposits was 4,632. “Not all those people will actually show up on campus but that was just under 2 percent higher than our target. So we pretty much landed on the nose,” he said. “This is an inexact science and getting that close to your target is pretty amazing.”
The incoming class had an increase in the number of Black and African-American students, Hispanic students and Asian students. The number of international students dropped by 10 from 289 to 279.
Overall, undergraduate enrollment in Pittsburgh went from 19,927 to 20,220. Graduate and professional school enrollment was up by 15, from 9,253 to 9,268.
The retention rate of full-time, first-year students dropped from 92.7 percent to 92.4 percent from 2022 to 2023. Wisniewski said they look at this number in key demographic groups as well. The data shows that students who receive Pell grants or who entered test-optional are retained at a lower rate, honors students are retained at a higher rate, as are those who participate in the summer Provost’s Academy, aimed at first-generation students.
Regionals
“The number of applications and deposits was down slightly from the prior years and that was across all the regional campuses,” Wisniewski said.
The number of applications for first-year students went from just over 20,000 to about 19,500. The deposits were at 1,299. Wisniewski said the mix of students changed slightly — with a slight increase in a number of international and Hispanic students, but a small decrease in the number of Black/African-American students and Asian students.
The overall number at the regionals dropped slightly from 4,454 to 4,283.
“We have implemented a number of different initiatives to try to help out the regionals,” Wisniewski said. “The University of Pittsburgh regional campuses face the same problems that the Penn State commonwealth campuses are facing and the PASSHE (Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education) schools are facing, as well as the enormous number of small liberal arts schools that are scattered throughout Western Pennsylvania. We have a decreasing population. And there’s a cliff coming up in a couple of years where the size of the 18-year-old class will drop off dramatically.”
One of the initiatives to address this problem has been increasing financial aid to the regionals, which they can use “in negotiating with people to try to get them to come to the regional campus, if they had a competing offer elsewhere.”
The provost’s office also is working with an outside company to talk to regional campus students who have left without a degree and trying “to get them to come back, to increase our enrollment and also increasing the outcomes for these students,” Wisniewski said.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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