Never before have lacrosse sticks been seen on Point Park’s campus — especially so many of them.
It’s been clear for many from the jump that the Fall 2025 class of freshmen are different from years prior.
The past year saw many new recruitment initiatives pop up. The biggest were the university’s brand-new men’s and women’s lacrosse and wrestling teams. But there were some other, more subtle, efforts that might have also played a role in this black sheep class of first-year students.
The Globe was given early access to nearly-finalized first-year student census data to compare it with last year’s.
The yearly census concluded collecting enrollment data on Sept. 12, but that data now must be extrapolated to ensure it is as accurate as possible, according to Chris Choncek, the university’s associate vice president of institutional research and planning.
Because of that, the numbers are likely not fully accurate, but they do paint a general picture of enrollment changes.
This year’s freshmen class is bigger than ever — the total first-year freshmen population (meaning students in their first-ever year of college) was 593 students. That’s 77 more than last fall’s class of 516.
And that number doesn’t encompass the total sum of first-year students, which includes transfer, non-traditional, part-time and graduate students, according to a university spokesperson. That total, including true first-years, is 1,370 this year — up 120 from last year’s class of 1,250.
President Chris Brussalis applauded the size of this year’s freshmen class and said enrollment spikes were due in part to initiatives from the university’s PioneerVision 2030 strategic plan.
“The thing that’s really great about this is we are growing across all seven of our schools,” Brussalis said. “It’s not just one area [that’s] doing well and another is doing poorly; they’re all doing well.”
While there are overall more men on campus, they are still outnumbered by women, according to Marlin Collingwood, who oversees enrollment. He credited this to the university’s dance program.
Collingwood also estimated that there were almost 20 non-binary students, which is up three from last year’s 17.
While dance still leads in enrollment, the SAEM program within the Rowland School of Business is catching up. Collingwood said this was related to the larger class of athletes.
“For whatever reason, 96% [to] 97% of our athletes are not Conservatory students,” Collingwood said.
While this year did see the largest-ever class of freshmen athletes, the jump in first-year enrollment is also related to a new outreach effort with rural counties in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.
That new effort was spearheaded by Brussalis.
“We needed to make significant change,” Brussalis said, “because if we were going to do the same thing over and over again [as we had been doing] for the last 40 years, we could not expect a different result.”
“We had to do something different, and so . . . [we embraced the fact that] we are a downtown, urban university.”
According to Collingwood, administrators thought Point Park’s Downtown Pittsburgh location would be enticing to prospective students from outside the city.
“We knew that there were students in small rural high schools who really wanted to be in the city,” Collingwood said. “They want something totally different.”
Collingwood added that Point Park had a strong “one-two punch” targeted advertising campaign, which paired the university’s urban location with its new lacrosse and wrestling teams.
Shari Payne, the university’s provost, added another point about Point Park’s rural recruitment efforts: targeting students studying at rural community colleges.
“We have put tremendous effort into getting articulation agreements [explanations of college-credit transfer policies] with not just our local community colleges, but all of the community colleges across the state of Pennsylvania, [Ohio, Maryland and West Virginia].”
She added that those who transfer to Point Park get “generous financial aid packages,” and that community college enrollment efforts are overall being expanded. Collingwood echoed her sentiment.
“We’ve always had great relationships with the community colleges,” Collingwood said, “but real emphasis has been placed on moving beyond just Allegheny County.”
Payne said for rural students, the jump to Pittsburgh is less daunting than a bigger city like New York.
“For a student from a really small town in Northwestern Pennsylvania, they and their parents are much more likely . . . to say, ‘Okay, you can go to Pittsburgh,’” Payne said.
