Undergraduate Programs Growing While Increasing Student Support and Access

One of the strategic priorities for BGSU and the Schmidthorst College of Business is to serve our community through access to high-quality learning experiences. This year, we are working with partners across campus to increase supports for deciding students interested in exploring business. BGSU is also expanding access to the signature Life Design program where students have the opportunity to learn design thinking and work with a coach to apply these principles to personalize their University experience and design their unique career path. We are working on updating our introduction to business course to integrate core Life Design principles so all business students will build this competency.

We have good news to share on the fall 2022 freshmen enrollments. As of July 26, 2022, we have 403 students registered, an increase of 3.87% over the fall 2021 enrollment at the same point in time. Our retention rate of fall 2021 cohort has also increased slightly to 86.58%, one of the best retention rates on campus, while the retention rate of our transfer students is 85.1%.

We will continue to work on engaging our students through co-curricular and experiential learning opportunities to further enhance our retention in the sophomore year.

We also continue to focus on diversity and inclusion. For the last academic year, 35% of our students were women and 17.6% were students of color. Further, 40% of committed students joining as first-year students this fall are first generation students.

In addition to these enrollment metric improvements, our four-year graduation rates have also increased slightly to 54.7% (fall 2017 cohort). It is interesting to note that the transfer students have a four-year graduation rate of 66.7%. Further, we have improved the time-to-degree metric to 3.7 years from 3.8 years.