Griffin NealEditor’s note: An earlier version of this article should have reported that 23,258 students attended the University of Mississippi’s campuses and medical school in September 2018, not 23,358.
Enrollment data for the 2019-2020 school year will not be released until November, the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning announced Friday afternoon in a press release.
Preliminary enrollment figures have traditionally been released in mid-September, but are being delayed this year so that the IHL can have a more complete data set of students actually enrolled across Mississippi campuses.
“As students continue to work through the admissions and financial aid processes on our respective campuses in order to complete the enrollment process, these numbers will change,” Alfred Rankins Jr., Commissioner of Higher Education said.
When IHL announced preliminary enrollment data in September of 2018, the final tally across the University of Mississippi’s regional campuses and medical school was 23,258. Final fall enrollment for the 2018-19 school year was 23,090, which is 268 students fewer (1.15%) than the original figure.
Since 2016, when university enrollment reached a record peak of 24,250 students, enrollment has decreased across both the regional campuses and the medical school.
The university is not alone in combating declining enrollment, as national college enrollment declined by 1.7% from spring 2018 to spring 2019, marking the eighth consecutive year that national college enrollment has declined.
