With just over 1,400 new and returning students committed on campus this fall, Elizabeth City State University can claim its first year-to-year enrollment increase in the last seven years and its largest freshman class in the last five year.
Officials attributed the increase to partnerships with regional community colleges and extensive work in recruiting transfer student processing.
“While I must make it absolutely clear to everyone involved that one uptick in fall enrollment can’t be interpreted as a trend, we will take a moment to celebrate this accomplishment because it is the first time in seven years that ECSU has seen an overall increase in enrollment,” said ECSU Chancellor Thomas Conway.
The increase coincides with ECSU’s new exclusively online Interdisciplinary Degree Program, which offers students, and particularly active duty military members, a chance to complete coursework remotely and to be enrolled full-time.
“We are a learning organization. We learn from our failures and our successes. This year has been no exception,” said Chancellor Conway. “We have identified a lot of things we can do better and we will be making adjustments in order to improve. We still have a lot of work to do.”
The increase posts a year before the school is scheduled to offer in-state students $500 per semester, as a part of the state’s higher education access plan, and two weeks after the debut of its new university logo and motto.
