DeKALB – Spring undergraduate re-enrollment reached decade-old peaks where total enrollment remained stagnant.
A 1% decline signified the 143 student difference of the 14,221 students re-enrolled in the spring 2024 semester compared to the previous spring.
The university saw similar trends in the fall where NIU’s fall 2023 enrollment saw less than a 1% decrease than the previous fall 2022 semester. But the difference remains minimal to the 4% re-enrollment drop in spring 2022 that had 615 fewer students than the previous year.
The minor decline in re-enrollment worked itself as a benefactor for NIU’s fall-to-spring re-enrollment undergraduate rate. Ninety one percent of undergraduate students returned from the fall semester, the second highest rate in over a decade.
“Fall to spring re-enrollment was really strong for undergraduate students, really the strongest that we’ve had in about the last six years so we’re very pleased with that,” said Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Laurie Elish-Piper.
The high undergraduate re-enrollment was attributed to efforts by a re-enrollment working group and plans that addressed financial and academic barriers which prevented students from re-enrolling, according to Elish-Piper.
“By working collaboratively and leveraging all those different connections on campus, we have found that students are much more likely to respond when it’s someone that they know who reaches out to them to provide that communication and support,” Elish-Piper said.
Compared to the spring 2023 semester, law student retention increased by 2.4% while graduate student re-enrollment dropped. NIU’s School of Law saw 157 less students return to the program while new graduate student enrollment went down 5%.
“We did see a little bit of a dip in our graduate student numbers,” Elish-Piper said. “Part of that is also that students graduate mid-year and so when we look from fall to spring, we do have students who graduate in December.”
In its place, the university gained 77 new first-years, an 8.5% increase from previous spring trends. New transfer student percentages followed closely with a 10.2% increase of 378 students joining.
