Kathryn Kendall, vice president for Enrollment Services, says the university is doing better with retention.

SUNY Fredonia’s enrollment plunge continues to level off, though the university is still losing a trickle of students.

The campus had 3,184 students as of Sept. 15, Vice President for Enrollment Services Kathryn Kendall told the College Council at its October meeting. She quoted a number of 3,206 at the council’s October 2024 meeting.

Kendall tried to put a positive spin on the latest data, emphasizing that the SUNY system’s enrollment target for the campus this year was 3,069 — so Fredonia hit and surpassed the target.

She also noted that the campus well outpaced its target of 400 graduate students for 2025, garnering 488.

“In some areas we are a little shy of the target, other areas exceeded the target, and overall, cumulatively came in above and stronger than what SUNY was anticipating us to be at,” Kendall said.

The campus is slightly below its undergraduate target. The SUNY system wanted 2,669 undergrads at Fredonia, and there are 2,665.

Kendall showed a line graph of September campus census captures from recent years. From 2019 to 2023, the campus lost an average of about 300 students annually. It went from 4,463 students in 2019 to 3,236 in fall 2023 before the downward slope leveled off.

“More times than not, what I hear is, ‘Oh, we’re still losing students,'” Kendall said. “While that is a true statement, it doesn’t really capture what we didn’t lose. The students we were able to retain because our retention rates are up, student growth in our graduate program is up, and some stability around the other components of our enrollment plan.

“So this tells me that what we’ve put into place last year and this year is helping tremendously. But we need to build on that. … We’ve got two years now of some stability, I would say, in enrollment to work from.”