Purdue president: Campus, WL ‘not built for the kind of enrollment we have today’

Facing the biggest – and surprising – freshman class in Purdue history, President Mung Chiang promises changes to ‘significantly reduce admissions rate’ next year

Purdue President Mung Chiang (Photo: Dave Bangert)

Next year, Purdue President Mung Chiang promises, the university will tighten the enrollment process to prevent surprise spikes in the freshman class, such as the one arriving on the West Lafayette campus this week for the fall 2024 semester.

After two years of predicting an admissions plateau for a decade of year-over-year record enrollment, Purdue wound up with its biggest incoming class in history – somewhere north of the record 10,191 freshmen in fall 2021 – and what Chiang called “crunch time” in housing and other space concerns on campus and in the surrounding community.

“This incoming year, we tried to reduce both the number and percentage of admissions,” Chiang said Monday. “We were surprised by the surge that actually, frankly, happened in early May.”