In a year when many college administrators are bracing for the impact of federal funding cuts and tighter restrictions on international students, Marymount University in northern Virginia has just welcomed its largest freshman class ever, marking a second consecutive year of record enrollment.
If the Arlington-based Marymount has cracked the code, it has done so by focusing relentlessly on an educational experience that leads not just to a degree, but to well-paid employment post-graduation.
Marymount has long had a strong nursing program that sends graduates into hospitals and doctors’ offices around the region. But in the last several years, the school has been expanding the fields in which it offers degrees, with a close eye on the kinds of skills employers in the greater Washington region say they need.
The upshot: freshmen enrollment this fall increased 15 percent over last year, to approximately 534 students.
“We now have other majors that are also in high demand, like computer science, mechanical engineering, neuroscience and biomedical engineering at the undergraduate level,” said President Irma Becerra. “At the graduate level, we’ve also added a Ph.D. in counseling, a doctorate in Business Intelligence and a doctorate in Education, Leadership and Innovation.”
“These are the kind of programs that our students want to study,” said Becerra.
Three out of four Marymount graduates report being employed within six months of graduation, and 87 percent said that their first job after graduation was in the field they studied.
Last year, the private Catholic university became the first institution in the state of Virginia to offer artificial intelligence as a standalone undergraduate major, Becerra said. It also offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the booming field of cybersecurity.
Evan Lipp, Marymount’s vice president of enrollment management, said that one of the main selling points for the school is that its graduates get hands-on training in work valued by local employers.
“We have high-demand programs that are leading to careers,” Lipp said. “The undergraduate experience incorporates an internship experience, and that’s also very attractive to our students, to our families and to future employers.”
Marymount has also been very aggressive about marketing itself. In the run-up to last year’s application season, Lipp’s team sent out seven million emails to potential students, resulting in 7,263 applications, a 44 percent increase over the previous year.
More than half of Marymount’s student body is made up of students who are racial minorities, which are underrepresented among college graduates nationwide.
Earlier this year, Carnegie Classification, in partnership with the American Council on Education, recognized Marymount as one of fewer than three dozen colleges and universities across the country that combine high-access admissions with higher-than-expected earnings.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the reason that their enrollment is growing is because they are exactly what the promise of higher education is,” said Mushtaq Gunja, executive director of Carnegie Classification. “They are doing an amazing job of enrolling students that reflect the demographics of the community, and those students are going off and they have really strong earnings.”
Eight years out from graduation, the median annual earnings for a Marymount graduate was $63,019, Gunja said.
“When we did a custom comparison for what students of that demographic earn in those geographies, the comparison earning was $40,000, so they’re doing 1.5 times what is expected,” he said.
Read the original article on the Washington Business Journal’s website.
