ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y., Oct. 6, 2017 — St. Bonaventure University’s enrollment of new undergraduates (freshmen and transfers) is up 4 percent from a year ago, and overall enrollment has been bolstered in part by continuing gains in online graduate programs.
Enrollment, including all undergraduate and graduate students, is up 4 percent since 2015 with SBU’s total student headcount increasing to 2,100, said Bernie Valento, vice president for enrollment.
“Our trajectory the last couple years has been more than encouraging, especially in a challenging higher education market,” said Dr. Dennis R. DePerro, president of St. Bonaventure. “To keep moving in the right direction and enhance our affordability, we’ve raised our academic scholarship packages significantly to attract better students as we strive to raise St. Bonaventure’s academic profile.”
St. Bonaventure was again this fall ranked the second-best value in New York in U.S. News & World Report’s regional universities rankings. SBU was fifth in the North for value out of 187 institutions.
The increased freshman enrollment can be attributed to many factors, including enhanced marketing and recruitment efforts, as well as several new strategic enrollment initiatives, Valento said.
“We didn’t even get health science approved by the state as a major until late February, and we still enrolled 17 freshmen in that program for the fall,” Valento said. “And with men’s lacrosse coming on board for play in fall 2018, we expect another nice bump from that.”
The addition of two fully online counseling programs helped boost total graduate enrollment by 18 percent over a year ago, reaching its highest number in more than five years.
“Thanks to the Bonaventure brand, we are attracting students from as far away as Hawaii, California and Arizona,” Valento said.
Almost 40 percent of the online enrollment came from outside New York, and more than 20 percent from areas in the state outside of Western New York.
