Baptist Enrollment at Baylor for the 2016-17 school year slipped below 30 percent for the first time since the university began tracking the statistic.
Baptist enrollment for the current school year was 4,832 )28.8 percent), the fourth straight year the number was below 5,000 despite an overall increase in enrollment numbers to 16,959, according to Baylor’s Institutional Research and Testing (IRT) area.
Only 273 percent of new freshmen self-identified as Baptists this year, compared with 27.9 percent for the 2016-16 school year.
Catholics continued to choose Baylor in increasing numbers, with 2,698 enrolling for the current school year, an increase of nearly 600 since 2010, now representing 18.1 percent of the student body. As discussed in a Winter 2016 Baylor Line cover story- http://tinyurl.com/BLWinter16- Baylor has been seeing the number of students who self-identify as Baptists shrink over time, with an increasing number identifying themselves as non-denominational Christians.
Other interesting data in the IRT reports includes:
Leading States of Origin: Few changes among the top 10, although Florida moved from 8th to 6th. Texas remains by far the largest source of Baylor students with 11,572, although that represents a drop over 2015, when 11,778 Texans were enrolled. No.2 California saw the biggest year-over-year increase, to 976 from 817.
Retention Rates: Second year retention of first-time freshmen continued its upward climb, with 89.0 percent returning to Baylor – continuing a trend the university has seen since the number hit its lowest point over the past two decades in 2009 at 81.9 percent.
Graduation Rates: Graduation within four years- a key indicator for keeping student debt under control- hit 62.7 percent for the first-time freshman class that entered Baylor in 2012. That’s the second straight year over 60 percent after levels in the late 1980s and 1990s in the 40s and in the early 2000s in the high 40s and low-to-mid 50 percent level.
Six-year graduation rates- a key metric the federal government tracks- were 73.9 percent for the class that entered Baylor in 2010. That figure was 3.5 percentage points higher than the class that entered in 2009, and higher than the data collected for the previous two decades, with the exception of the classes that entered Baylor in 2006 and 2007.
Standardized Test Scores The 2,168 first time freshman who took the ACT had an average score of 28.1, a continuation of a strong upward trend that started in 2013 when the average score was 26.8. The news was worse for the 1,335 first-time freshmen who took the SAT, with the average score of 1220 continuing a six-year decline. The average score in 2011 was 1235 after a big increase over 2010, when the average score was 1,218.
Legacy students The percentage of first-year freshmen with Baylor alumni in their families dropped a bit to 28.6 percent for the current school year, compared with 28.8 percent in 2015-16.
