UGA is expecting approximately 6,400 new students this fall, including 4,970 freshmen and almost 1,400 transfer students. The number of applications received for this year’s freshman class—nearly 19,000—is the highest recorded at UGA for a new class, following several years of record applications. Since 2003, applications for UGA’s freshman class have increased by more than 50 percent. Coming on the heels of 2011’s record-breaking freshman class of 5,500, this year’s class size is more typical, similar to the 2010 incoming freshmen.
“In a year of continuing economic uncertainty and significant adjustments to the HOPE Scholarship, it was difficult to predict the impact this would have on our yield rate,” said Nancy McDuff, associate vice president for admissions and enrollment management. “But our goal was to continue to serve the state and maintain our -commitment to excellence and academic achievement by limiting our offers of admission to ensure that we enrolled our capacity class of 4,900.”
The entering freshmen once again will have a strong GPA that exceeds 3.8. The GPA range for the middle 50 percentile is 3.63-4.0. Additionally, this class has the highest SAT average in UGA history with a combined mean critical reading and math score of 1273, plus an average writing score of 614, for an 1887 on the 2400 scale. This combined score is up 27 points from the 2011 freshman class and 11 points from 2010.
With more than 27 percent of the entering freshmen self-identifying as other than Caucasian, the ethnic and racial makeup of the entering class shows continuing diversity. More than 360 first-year African-American students have enrolled in fall 2012 (7.3 percent of the class), and more than 250 entering first-year students have self-identified as Hispanic (5.1 percent of the class). Almost 7 percent come from families in which English is not the native language. Approximately 6 percent of the incoming freshmen will be the first in their immediate family to attend college.
