Rochester Admissions Update: Early…Huge…Wow…

Rochester’s growth as a top private university has been epic since 2006. We’ve added 17 campus buildings and a second (and huge) retail center next to campus (with Moe’s and Insomnia Cookies … dangerous to my diet). We’ve added 21 new degree programs, including two bachelor’s in business, four in public health, and exclusive blends of arts with technology. We’ve added 1,500 students in the College alone, and our graduate schools and Eastman School of Music have grown too. Undergraduate research is expanding exponentially.

We should have seen this year’s surge in Early Decision students coming. Just when we decided we can’t enroll as many new freshmen as during the last two (record) years, more than 300 excellent students have claimed a space in the Class of 2019 through the first round of Early Decision. That’s a 28% increase over last year.

We sent those Early letters this week and we were eating some cookies in celebration when the news arrived that applications for our Combined and Dual Degree (professional) Programs in music, nursing, engineering, education, and medicine were up 61%—with more than 1,000 for Early Medical Scholars alone. It’s going to take a lot of snacks to get through the reading ahead. Fortunately, we have some nice snow to look at while we’re stuck in here.

One of our amazing admissions counselors, Adrienne Amador, reading applications