Jan. 19, 2007

VCU state’s largest four-year public institution

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• Headcount enrollment is the number of individual students, both full-time and part-time, registered for credit courses. • Virginia Tech has the largest number of full-time students — 25,667. VCU has 21,471, U.Va. has 19,900 and GMU has 15,968. Virginia Tech was the largest school by total headcount until 2003, when GMU topped it. • Northern Virginia Community College can claim the largest enrollment of any state school, with 36,884 this fall. The two-year school has 13,129 full-time students. COURTESY RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
• Headcount enrollment is the number of individual students, both full-time and part-time, registered for credit courses. • Virginia Tech has the largest number of full-time students — 25,667. VCU has 21,471, U.Va. has 19,900 and GMU has 15,968. Virginia Tech was the largest school by total headcount until 2003, when GMU topped it. • Northern Virginia Community College can claim the largest enrollment of any state school, with 36,884 this fall. The two-year school has 13,129 full-time students. COURTESY RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

Virginia Commonwealth University is now the state’s largest four-year public institution, with 30,381 students enrolled for the fall semester. Some highlights of VCU’s growth:


•    VCU is the first university in the commonwealth to exceed 30,000 students. Since 1999, VCU has had the lowest tuition and fees of any of Virginia’s research institutions.

•    Over the past decade, VCU’s in-state enrollment has increased from 19,694 students to 26,446 students, a 34 percent increase. VCU enrolls more Virginia residents than any other four-year college or university.

•    VCU has accommodated nearly one-third of the total growth in resident undergraduate students at Virginia’s public four-year colleges and universities between Fall 1997 and Fall 2006.  It has accommodated nearly two-thirds of the growth in resident graduate students at Virginia’s public colleges and universities over the past nine years.

•    The size of the freshman class has increased by 84 percent over the last 10 years, from 1,928 to 3,540. Of those, about the same number of freshmen from the Richmond metro area — approximately 900 — have attended for the past decade.

•    Ninety percent of the 10-year growth in student enrollment has been in full-time students.

•    Enrollment of minority students at VCU has increased by 52 percent, from 5,805 students to 8,827, making VCU one of the most diverse universities in the country.

•    The number of international students continues to grow. Nearly 1,130 foreign students attend VCU now, versus 473 10 years ago.

•    VCU has been able to increase enrollments by nearly 50 percent without compromising student quality. In the past 10 years, the average GPA of incoming freshmen increased from 2.96 to 3.23 and SAT scores increased from 1002 to 1065.