In a campus-wide email sent to students, faculty and staff on Monday morning, Auburn University President Jay Gogue said the University has seen a 37% increase of minority student applicants and an 18% increase of Black student applicants during its current application period, which ends May 1.
Gogue's email follows the formation of a University task force intended to address and improve equality and inclusion on campus last June. The email also comes after a local activist group, Auburn Students & Community for Change, published a letter demanding changes for racial equity last week.
"Recruitment of minority students remains an institutional priority and an essential goal in our strategic plan," Gogue said in the email. "Since deploying key strategies, we've seen a shift in the makeup of our application pool. We also admitted more minority and Black students this year."
Gogue linked to the University's 2019-2024 strategic plan in his email, which shows statistics that Auburn's 2023-2024 graduating class is made up of 25,000 undergraduates and 7,000 graduates for a total of 32,000 students. 5,000 members of the 2023-2024 class are considered freshmen in course credit hours.
The class of 2023-2024 saw increases in areas like first-generation status — students who are the first in their family to attend college — with 19% of students being first-generation. 16.4% of students in the 2018-2019 class were first-gen, while only 9.5% in the 2014-2015 class were among this group.
Graduating seniors 2023-2024 class are also estimated to have an average debt of $12,000 compared to the 2019-2020 class who saw an average of $11,500. Those in the 2014-2015 class averaged $11,435 in debt.
Among graduate enrollment in the 2023-2024 class, 1,150 students are first-professional students, 3,700 are masters and education specialist students and 2,150 are doctoral students. Of the three categories, masters and education specialist students saw the greatest increase over the 2018-2019 class, which had 2,925 students in this category.
The University's strategic plan also shows that greater than 60% of students in the 2023-2024 class are in-state enrollees and 17.5% were eligible for Pell Grants. The mean ACT test score of the class is 27.7, while the mean high school grade point average is 3.90. No comparisons were made to earlier classes for these statistics.
"We will not know until late spring how many students who were offered admission to Auburn plan to enroll in the fall, as May 1 is the enrollment deposit deadline," Gogue said of incoming fall 2021 students.
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Tim Nail, junior in journalism, is the campus editor for The Auburn Plainsman.
