By Gavin Guffey, Staff Writer 

After yielding fewer than 800 students in the class of 2029, Xavier’s administration is optimistic about both the enrollment numbers and academic profile of the incoming class of 2030.

Xavier’s current freshman class was not what the university had hoped for, with enrollment coming up more than 200 students below the goal of 1000. However, university officials are open about this struggle along with their efforts to correct previous shortcomings with the upcoming class of 2030.

“We lost some key months of building that class, recruiting, and that played out all the way through. We were down in applications. We ended up down in the number of admits. We didn’t yield,” Vice President of Strategic Enrollment Management Scott Clyde said.

Clyde began with Xavier in July 2024 after being Executive Director of Enrollment Management and Student Financial Strategies at the University of Notre Dame. As a result, Clyde said the enrollment office did not have time to apply the correct strategies to effectively recruit the ideal number of students in the class of 2029.

“When you’re really thinking about recruiting a class, you start in enrollment management years ahead, three to four years,” Clyde said.

The lack of students has become a widespread issue for higher educational institutions due to the looming “demographic cliff” in the United States. Because of sharp declining fertility rates most notably beginning in 2007, the number of high schoolers have decreased. Thus, colleges are now competing with one another for a lower number of students than the year before, and this will continue for at least a decade.

“It’s hard work out there because the competition is fierce and there’s a lot fewer college-going available in the market just from the demographic cliff. And so it’s just a very highly competitive market,” Vice President of Student Affairs and Chief Student Success Officer Dr. Kimberly Moore said.

Additionally, Xavier’s retention, or the percentage of students who continue with their education at the same institution from their first to second year, had dropped to as low as 77.5% in the fall of 2024. Similar institutions such as University of Dayton, Butler University, Loyola University Chicago and others tend to sit between 87% to 92%.

To correct these two lapses, Xavier’s administration has been attempting to align its vision, with different offices working cohesively.

“Oftentimes at different institutions, retention is doing its own thing, and admissions and recruitment is doing its own thing, and you just let the chips fall. Well, here we’re being super intentional to actually acknowledge the interdependency and then have that be our approach to both recruitment and retention,” Moore said.

The process to improve both recruitment and retention simultaneously has been highlighted by two prominent efforts by the university: the “recruiting sophomores” and “student success” strategies.

Recruiting sophomores is all about focusing on recruiting high school students and supporting them through their first year both academically and socially, to improve retention to sophomore year.

“What it means is every student we admit, we want to show up in the fall of their sophomore year and then persist and graduate. It doesn’t really do anybody much good if you get somebody here and they spend time and money, and don’t have anything to show for it. It’s like a sunk investment,” Clyde said.

Recruiting sophomores is centered heavily around retention, as is student success.

“The goal is for students to graduate. That’s the ultimate metric. And this whole thing about retention, persistence and graduation is called student success,” Moore said. 

With the process and outline complete, the university has now shifted its focus to improving student life and retention from each semester to the next.

“In the last two years, we’ve really been hyper-focused on enhancing student engagement. So, we’ve conducted over 12 student focus groups in two years to ask students why they come, why they stay and why they leave, if they do leave,” Moore said. “In the last 18 months, we’ve launched over 30 different initiatives just on student life to enhance that experience.”

Of these, Moore highlighted many initiatives including Sal Vulcano’s upcoming performance in Cintas Center, Greek Life, Red Bike, Metro and Lyft Passes, mental health resources and more. As for its future plans, the most notable is the university’s letter of intent to purchase University Station Apartments in light of the new three-year housing requirement.

The enrollment goal of 1000 students remains constant for the class of 2030 – a number the university is confident it can hit.

“I am looking to get over 1000 students this year, and I’ve got some pretty good indicators that’s achievable as of today,” Clyde said.

Additionally, Moore insisted on a student-first approach for the administration.

“We have something amazing to offer for students who choose Xavier, and we’re going to continue to make the student experience better and better every year, and the ability to succeed here better and better every year,” Moore said.

Newswire photo by Audrey Elwood

Xavier’s administration hopes that enrollment will increase in 2026-2027.