Record Fall Enrollment At Sacramento State

California State University, Sacramento will have about 29,700 students starting the semester on August 31.  

Ed Mills, Vice President for Student Affairs at Sacramento State, says the incoming 3,800 first-year students is a new record for the school. He says the previous record was 3,600.

"Larger and larger numbers of the students that apply to Sacramento State every year actually are from outside the region, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California," says Mills. 

He says a record number 35,000 students applied for admission to the school for the Fall.

Mills says more than 50 percent of the applicants this year were from outside the six-county Sacramento region. 

"Part of it is more students and the competitiveness of getting into college and part of is the change in this campus becoming more of a destination campus throughout the state," says Mills. 

He says 98.5 percent of students attending Sacramento State this Fall are from California.  

Along with the incoming first-year students, Mills says 3,800 community college students have transferred to the school this fall.

Mills says the top programs attracting community college transfer students include business, criminal justice, psychology and health science ... and the most competitive major on the campus is the nursing program. He says students getting into the program have 4.0 grade point averages.

One of the new initiatives at the school - and the CSU system as a whole - is to help students graduate at a faster rate.

During the recession, Mills says, it was harder for students to get classes at colleges, including Sacramento State. He says the incoming first-year students are taking a higher average credit load than previous classes, and the students are now able to get all the courses they need.