Georgia College & State University’s (GCSU) sunny campus was bustling on Friday as dozens of students and faculty members congregated at Russell Auditorium to hear President Cathy Cox’s annual State of the University Address.
One of Cox’s main focuses in her hour-long speech was the implications of the University’s record-breaking freshman class in Fall 2023, with 1,816 new bobcats being welcomed to campus, according to Cox.
To admit this unprecedented number of new students, Georgia College had to start doing a few things differently.
In addition to dropping the SAT and ACT testing requirements for fall 2023 admission, GC started taking a more “holistic” view of students, meaning the extracurricular and life experience of applicants was taken heavily into consideration, in addition to their high school GPAs.
GCSU also began purchasing the names and contact information of approximately 100,000 ninth-grade students in Georgia, allowing GCSU to contact potential applicants years in advance.
With such a significant amount of newly admitted freshmen, Cox responded to how GCSU will continue to accommodate their presence on campus.
“We did have to add some faculty at the last minute to make up for those freshman and sophomore classes, to keep those classes small. Then, as that class moves along, if our classes stay at around 17 or 18 hundred, we’ll just have to add more faculty in upper classes,” Cox explained, “If it goes back to maybe 15, 16 hundred, then we could shift some faculty from first-year classes to junior and senior level classes.”
However, increasing faculty numbers and amounts of classes offered isn’t the only major impact the class of 2027 will have on GCSU.
This historic first-year class will open the door for Georgia College to receive a significantly larger amount of budget and funding from the University System of Georgia. This would be a benefit for all GCSU students.
“President Cox talked about how with the current [budgeting] system… It’s based on admissions from two years ago” said Connor Hilly, president of the GCSU’s Student Government Association.
“So, for a lot of [our campus] organizations, we’re [still] suffering from the pandemic, monetarily, because we kinda have this lag where our budget is based on 2020 and 2021… By fiscal year 2025, we’ll start to see the benefits of this new, bigger class.”
On top of its massive freshman class, GCSU also sports the third highest retention rate of any school in the USG, with 84% of students deciding to attend Georgia College again in fall 2023. This score puts them right behind the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech in terms of student retention, Cox said.
Cox also reported the high academic success rate of GCSU’s student-athletes, the large amount of undergraduate research conducted by students, and GCSU’s recent emphasis on the collection of student data.
Cox has served as the President of Georgia College since October 2021 and has introduced multiple plans and initiatives to improve the happiness and wellbeing of the students and faculty at GCSU.