22 Sep The Blue Hawk family is growing! Enrollment increases at Dickinson State
The numbers are in and it’s official: Dickinson State University’s (DSU) campus is growing. According to the official fourth-week census, taken Monday, Sept. 20, 2021, the 269 new freshmen continue the upward trend in enrollment. This is a 10% increase over last year’s 244 first-year students and makes the largest incoming class in five years.
The number of full-time enrolled students increased 2% at 990, up from last year’s total of 967 despite overall headcount (the number of persons taking at least one class) decreasing from 1441 to 1415. The full-time equivalency (FTE) of credit hours taken also increased 0.6%, from 1,147.13 to 1,154.23.
DSU’s residence halls are at near-capacity for the first time in several years with 298 students living on campus.
“We are excited about the good news on enrollment. Bucking national trends, we increased the number of full-time students, the number of credits taken, the number of freshmen, and the number of students in our residence halls,” said DSU President Steve Easton. “The only category where we decreased was courses taken by high school students, but we expect that number to increase this spring as some of our high school partners have shifted dual credit courses from fall to spring. Thus, as we like to say at DSU, Hawks are up!”
Students enrolled this fall represent 35 states and 21 countries with 64% indicating North Dakota residency and 2.5% indicating international residency.
Highlights from fall 2021 enrollment data:
- Enrollment of online students is up more than 18% from 730 in fall 2020 to 864 in fall 2021 with 298 exclusively online and 566 taking some, but not all, of their classes online.
- Nontraditional students, those over age 25, represent over 20% of enrollment.