Purdue: Don’t expect record enrollment again this fall

After a surprise surge in 2024, university officials expect a more conservative approach will keep enrollment in check for fall 2025. Plus, fallout from JD Vance's redistricting pitch at Statehouse

(Photo: Dave Bangert)

Purdue officials said this week that they don’t anticipate a spike in the incoming freshman class when the academic year starts in three weeks, avoiding the last-minute scramble for residence hall space that smacked the West Lafayette campus last year when an unexpected record-breaking number of incoming students helped shatter enrollment records during the fall 2024 semester.

Purdue expects between 8,800 and 9,000 incoming students for the start of the fall 2025 semester, Provost Patrick Wolfe told BiL this week.

That would rank this year’s freshman class between the fifth and sixth largest on the West Lafayette campus in Purdue’s history. The top five incoming freshman classes of all time for Purdue have come in the past five years.

But it would be a far cry from the 10,628 freshman who accepted Purdue offers for the fall 2024 semester, a number that pushed overall enrollment past 55,000 – or 5.6% more students than a record set the previous year – and far outpaced the university’s projections, putting the campus and the surrounding community on their heels a year ago.

“The dust doesn’t truly settle until after the first week of classes, where we declare census,” Wolfe said. “But that is pretty significantly different from last year. And that is entirely intentional. …