The University of Maryland Eastern Shore saw a third consecutive year of increased new student enrollment and welcomed the largest influx of freshmen and transfer students in eight years.
This year’s enrollment totaled 2,844 students, comprised of 2,233 undergraduate students and 611 enrolled in graduate and professional programs. There were 930 new undergraduates, including 717 freshmen.
“We continue to push the needle to welcome in as many students as we’re capable of serving,” said Latoya Jenkins, UMES’s Vice President of Enrollment Management and Student Experience. “I think that ultimately we’ll surpass the largest class we had in 2015, but we still have work to do to ultimately see where we will end up.”
In the fall of 2022, 733 new undergraduate students were enrolled at UMES, which was shy of the 1,011 students who came to Princess Anne at the start of the 2015 school year.
The increased enrollment numbers at UMES are following a national trend which has seen continual new student growth at Historically Black Colleges and Universities since 2020.
The drive to increase enrollment has been one of the initiatives driven by President Heidi M. Anderson since the return to campus following the pandemic. Jenkins said President Anderson challenged them to not only to continue to increase enrollment but also to enhance retention efforts, which have seen a 10 percent uptick.
As part of the mission to raise student enrollment, the admissions and recruitment department has worked on strategies to not only raise awareness of the UMES brand to students and parents, but also strengthen connections with stakeholders according to Darryl Isom, Director of Admissions and Recruitment.
“I’ve been here about two years, and when I initially came on board, the determination was that the UMES brand really needed to be defined,” Isom said. “We needed to get a unified message into the community, into our feeder schools, and into the nation of what we really are about, our unique programs, our family atmosphere, and how we have all the resources of a research institution but the feel of a very small liberal arts school and that has really resonated.”
Isom also attributes the gains to the outstanding work of his admissions and recruitment staff, which continues to expand.
“We’re seeing the benefits of that where our name, our brand, our name recognition is really growing locally as we had to re-penetrate and reinforce our mission locally with our local market, nationally, and even internationally to a certain extent,” he said. “My team has gotten out there and really told the story of UMES and what a really wonderful institution this is. So that has been very instrumental in the pivot that we did initially in terms of our recruiting strategy.”
That recruiting strategy also includes the use of a regional ad campaign through Baltimore-based tbc, Inc., targeting the New York City, Philadelphia, Norfolk, and Atlanta, Salisbury and the Baltimore/Washington D.C. markets. In addition to the campaign, UMES partnered with consulting firms such as Ruffalo Noel Levitz geared to helping UMES create best practices for enrollment management.
Recruiting isn’t the only focus. There is also an emphasis on registering transfer students, which include junior and community college graduates. So far, an estimated 200 transfer students are expected to make their way to Princess Anne.
Jenkins said as a result of partnerships with institutions including Wor-Wic Community College, UMES has been able to share its stories and information about the rate of success students with two-year degrees have at the university.
“When students transfer from Wor-Wic to UMES, they do better and graduate in less time to complete their four-year degree,” she said. “That’s not something UMES or Wor-Wic made up, that’s baked in our data from the national clearinghouse.”
As the student population and campus community continues to grow and new academic courses are unveiled such as the new online and continuing education programs, Jenkins said one of the long-term goals is to return enrollment numbers back to pre-pandemic levels, something which is not out of the realm of possibility but will involve continual progress.
“We have talked about charting the heights of our enrollment that was, in 2017, upwards of the times which we had around 4,000 students,” she said. “I think that coming out of a pandemic and where our institution is, we are poised to grow, but it will take us some time to get back to those numbers.”
