Enrollment for fall ‘07 to increase for fifth straight year
Under the supervision of a new Vice President for enrollment, freshmen admissions numbers continued to climb for the fi fth year in a row, with a record 8,777 students applying for a spot in the 2008 freshman class. Of 2,228 accepted applications, 742 students, about 33 percent, have declared their intention of attending Rice next fall — and, for the first time ever, they made their commitment deposits online. Vice President for Enrollment Chris Muñoz said there were two main changes to the admissions process this year. They first expedited the process of collecting admissions commitments by allowing students to not only accept an offer online but also to deposit money to secure a place in the freshman class. The change means the enrollment office has more complete data on this fall’s expected attendees than it did at the time demographics were compiled last year. “It’s like comparing apples and oranges,” Muñoz said. “The numbers now are just so much more complete.” In addition to moving to a Webbased system, students who marked themselves as ethnically multiracial on their applications were counted that way during the admissions process, instead of being lumped in with one of their multiple ethnicities. In previous years, he said, students who identified as half-black, half-white were counted as black for admissions demographics purposes. Muñoz made the executive decision to change Rice’s policy as a result of discussion among other member schools of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, a 31-university organization of enrollment administrators at elite private institutions. He said Rice’s previous method was the standard COFHE approach, but changing attitudes toward multiracial groups caused Rice and two other COFHE schools to switch to the current system. “[More of this generation’s students] are the result of multicultural, multiracial parents — that group can be similar to whoever they might identify with or they can be completely different, or they can be a mix or montage of the two,” Muñoz said. “They call it the Tiger Woods Syndrome factor.” About five percent of this fall’s freshman class identifies as multiracial — 37 of the 742 expected attendees, in contrast with the class of 2010, for which the enrollment demographics labeled a single student as multiracial. Additionally, the number incoming black students rose from 33 in fall 2006 to 55, from similarly sized acceptee pools, indicating a positive change in yield — the percentage of acceptees who choose to attend. The numbers of Mexican- American and Latino attendees fell this year by three and four, respectively. About 45 percent of 2007’s expected matriculants identify as white, and about 21 percent identify as Asian-American. 54 more men than women plan to enter Rice this fall, making the incoming class 54 percent male. Muñoz said he was surprised to discover what academic areas were most affected by the gender jump from the 2006 matriculants, in which 10 more women entered Rice than men. “We’re up 31 percent in engineering,” he said. “Typically that means, proportionally, more men select engineering than women. Well, what we discovered was that we actually admitted more women as a percent in engineering this year than a year ago, but few of them elected to deposit … The biggest difference is the humanities and social sciences.” This year, 72 of 174 male acceptees to Rice’s School of Social Sciences will matriculate, a 41 percent yield. Last year’s yield was 27 percent, or 45 of 167 men. The numbers held steady for women in social sciences, with one more expected attendee this year than last. In the humanities, 40 of 88 male acceptees will attend this year — 45 percent, up from 35 percent last year — while 29 percent of 186 female acceptees in the humanities have elected to come to Rice this year, as opposed to last year’s 38 percent yield. Engineering and natural sciences yield rates have held fairly steady, with more acceptees and more planned attendees across both genders and disciplines. The architecture school expects 23 new students and the Shepherd School of Music has 32 planned attendees. Regionally, admissions distributions have not varied much from the previous two years. About 45 percent of the incoming class lives in Texas, and about 7 percent of matriculants are international. Muñoz said the number of new transfer students appears to be up slightly, from 60 to 68, but that those numbers may still fluctuate.
/ Columnist
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