Vice President of Enrollment Management Robin Bowlus photo courtesy Bluffton University Public Relations
Bluffton University increased enrollment of new students for the 2019-20 school year, with a total of 250. The group of new students includes 231 traditional-age first-year students, meaning they came straight from high school to college, and 19 transfer students, according to Robin Bowlus, vice president of enrollment management. For comparison, in 2018-19, the university brought in 173 traditional first-year students and 12 transfer students for a total of 185 new students.
Bowlus attributed this increase to a combination of having the right people doing the right things at the right time throughout the year.
“We got all new admissions counselors who are all Bluffton alumni,” Bowlus said. “We also made improvements to our financial aid process. Additionally, our coaches, consistently throughout all teams, did an outstanding job with recruiting last year.”
Bowlus said she believes the increase in students will help improve campus vibrancy.
“There’s just more people — more people in your classes, more people to go to campus events, more people cheering on teams, participating in music programs,” Bowlus said.
So far, Bowlus sees a strong sense of community as one of this year’s first-year class’s biggest strengths.
Campus Pastor Stephen “Tig” Intagliata teaches a section of this year’s Becoming a Scholar class. 231 first-year students joined Bluffton this August. Photo by Day’Vion Smith
“I think from move-in weekend and opening convocation, they clearly have a strong sense of community,” Bowlus said. “I think the first-year class seems to be a fun group of people. They like being involved in things and supporting things, so I think community will be one of our core values that’s their greatest attribute.”
The average high school GPA for this year’s first-year class is 3.26, compared to an average of 3.19 of last year’s first-year class. The American Students of Color are at 24% compared to 20.5% last year. Mennonite students make up 4.3% of the first-year class compared to 2.8% last year. International students in the class are 16% compared to 20% last year, which Bowlus attributes to federal regulations regarding education visas becoming more stringent, noting that the international student population on campus is still the largest it has been in many years.
Two areas that Bowlus focused on specifically were the male to female ratio and athlete to non-athlete ratio, both of which she wants to bring closer to a 50-50 balance. Males make up 63% of this year’s first-year class, while 37% of the class are women. Varsity athletes make up 67% of the class, compared to 76% last year.
“We need to continue to work on a better balance of our female to male ratio,” Bowlus said. “That is not unique to us, there’s more seats on college campuses than there are young people to sit in them, so the women get spread out more. Another piece that we’re trying to balance more evenly is athletes to non-athletes.”
Additionally, no one from the first-year class left Bluffton from the first day of classes to census day on Sept. 9, which Bowlus contributed to student life redoing the programming for move-in and Welcome Week.
Looking towards next year, Bowlus said the enrollment goal is 225 students.
“I know 225 seems silly, but our goal this year was 200,” Bowlus said. “We really over exceeded it. It is a tremendously difficult time to recruit in higher ed right now, so 225 is what we want to bring in, but we’re going to try to get 250.”
