Colorado State University's record-breaking fall enrollment tops pre-pandemic high

A record 34,218 students are enrolled at Colorado State University’s main campus in Fort Collins this fall, a 1.3% increase from the fall of 2023, the university announced Thursday on Source , an online publication of its marketing and communications team.

That total includes 5,485 first-year students, representing the second largest incoming class in CSU history, spokesperson Tiana Kennedy wrote following a presentation by Provost and Executive Vice President Marion Underwood on enrollment and student success to the CSU System Board of Governors.

The incoming class is the most diverse in CSU history, with 31% identifying as racially or ethnically diverse and 23% being first-generation college students.

“We believe this helps underscore two important things,” Underwood said. “We are serving our land-grant mission, and our students find great promise in pursuing a CSU degree.”

CSU’s previous high in fall enrollment was in 2019, with 34,166 students. Enrollment figures dropped significantly the following year during the COVID-19 pandemic but have increased steadily since then.

Overall, 65% of CSU students on the Fort Collins campus this fall are Colorado residents, Underwood told the Board of Governors during the first of two days of meetings at CSU’s Agricultural Research, Development and Education Center and CoBank Center for Ag Education northeast of Fort Collins. The number of students from rural Colorado increased by 3.5%.

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“We are very proud that the academic quality of our class stayed very steady from year to year; the average incoming (grade-point average) is about 3.71,” Underwood said.

The record fall enrollment, Underwood said, comes on the heels of record summer 2024 enrollment that was up 11.3% from the previous year.

The biggest increases in academic colleges within the university were in engineering, with a 7% increase over the previous fall; agricultural sciences, with a 6.6% increase; and business, with a 5.4% increase overall and a 25.3% increase in graduate students.

Student-success rates also continued to improve for returning students, Underwood said. The four- and five-year graduation rates increased, while the six-year rate remained steady.

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com , x.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news .

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Colorado State University's record-breaking fall enrollment tops pre-pandemic high