OBSERVER Photo by M.J. Stafford SUNY Fredonia students walk recently next to Reed Library, with Maytum Hall looming in the background. The university recently experienced a serious drop in enrollment but appears to be halting the decline.

Enrollment data on SUNY Fredonia’s website show a university that has just about halted — but not yet reversed — a significant enrollment decline.

The enrollment vice president for the campus recently offered some optimism about the “head count” at the final College Council meeting of the 2024-25 school year. Spurred by that, the OBSERVER looked at SUNY Fredonia’s contributions to the Common Data Set. That’s “a set of standards and definitions of data items widely agreed upon by the higher education community,” according to the SUNY Fredonia website.

As of Oct. 15, 2019, the campus had 4,463 students of all types. A year later, on Oct. 15, 2020, that number was down to 4.075.

The losses continued as the COVID-19 epidemic wound down. SUNY Fredonia reported 3,780 students on Oct. 15, 2021. In 2022, it was 3,524 students, on an Oct. 19 reporting day.

The 2023-24 report appears to contain most of the same information as the previous editions, but is formatted differently. It no longer contains a number totaling all students.

However, by adding the 2,876 undergraduate students enrolled and the 351 graduate students, one comes up with a total campus enrollment of 3,226 for October 2023.

There’s no full data set available yet for the 2024-25 school year — but a fall 2024 enrollment report indicated a total of 3,201 students on campus (2,773 undergrad and 428 graduate).

That’s lower than 2023, but only by 25 — not a drop of hundreds of students, as had occurred in the previous few years.

Kathryn Kendall, the enrollment vice president, is optimistic that’s a sign the steep curve of losses has straightened out. She offered numbers to the College Council that suggest SUNY Fredonia may be starting to add students.

Kendall said the campus has received 646 deposits from first year full time students to attend classes in 2025-26. At the same time last year, 595 first year full time students had deposited for 2024-25.

Additionally, there are 88 transfer students, up from 79 last spring. The 66 graduate students declared for 2025-26 is “about on par” with last year, Kendall said.

“These numbers are very encouraging,” she said. “I would like to see us above 700 (first year full time students) by midsummer. That would make me very, very happy.”

The Common Data Set statistics are available under the Institutional Research, Planning & Assessment section of SUNY Fredonia’s website.