Friday Focus: We're back!
Owen Guthrie, vice chancellor of student affairs and enrollment management
Aug. 22, 2025
— Owen Guthrie, vice chancellor of student affairs and enrollment management
The nights grow darker and cooler, and just as the season turns and the geese return to the skies, our campus is once again filled with the great surge of life that is fall at UAF. Our students are back!
Thursday was such a great day. First thing in the morning, cars and trucks filled with students and parents loaded with boxes and bags were all lined up outside MBS, Wickersham, Cutler, and other halls to await their turn to offload. There was just the right amount of chaos as our new and returning residents moved a year’s worth of belongings into their new spaces. We’ve had a busy summer of guests and camps, but this was a whole order of magnitude more lively. The surge of students just brings a new level of joy to our fair campus!
In fact, this fall, we have about 156 more students living in on-campus residences than last year, which means we have over 1,200 total undergraduate students living on the Troth Yeddha’ campus. This is more than we’ve had in many years, and my thanks go out to Teddi Walker, director of Residence Life, and the rest of the team (and a legion of volunteers) for all they do to get 1,200 students situated in new surroundings within a matter of hours. Amazing work!
After move-in, New Student Orientation kicked off mid-morning. I am thrilled to say that we had over 640 new students sign up for orientation, which is almost 200 more than last year. The surge was clearly evident as the Wood Center was packed with students and parents finding their bearings. Behind the scenes, UAF also rolled out a new online orientation experience designed to answer the majority of questions about coming to UAF before students ever set foot on campus. Within hours of it going live, we had over 700 students complete the online orientation. Kudos to J Groseclose and the Enrollment Management communications team, and to Josh Hovis and the Center for Student Engagement for knocking it out of the park in building these online and in-person experiences to help our new students feel at home and find their way!
By the numbers, UAF is up about 4% in total headcount, that’s around 240 additional
new students this fall, compared to the same time last year. Plus, our students are
taking about 6.5% more student credit hours, or nearly 4,000 additional credit hours
over last year at this point. Amazing! We are beating the national trends, which are
largely going in the other direction. We are also up about 30% in the number of new
UA Scholars attending UAF, about 40 of these students. These are Alaska high school
students graduating in the top 10% of their class. It is a great expression of confidence
in UAF that more of Alaska’s top students are choosing what we have to offer; these
students can go anywhere, and they are choosing UAF! My thanks and deep gratitude
to all the Enrollment Management leaders and teams for helping make this happen, including
Admissions, Financial Aid, Registrar, Dual Enrollment, Student Success Center, Department
of Military and Veteran Services, and Nanook Advising!
On the graduate student side of things at UAF, we had 132 students RSVP for fall 2024 orientation, and this year we have a whopping 164! We have admitted 100 Ph.D. students for fall 2025 (compared to 69 admits last year), increasing our admit number by 45%. While we are still growing, thus far we have 57 Ph.D. students enrolled for fall 2025 (last year we enrolled 47), increasing our graduate Ph.D. enrollment number by over 20% compared to last fall. This is news worthy of celebration! Three cheers for Emeline Jones and the Graduate School team (and of course, our academic colleges and research institutes) for growing and serving this new cohort.
All of these new and returning faces, all of this exciting activity filling our halls, this is no accident. We didn’t just get lucky this fall. This is the fruit of the labors of so many, and I’ve only mentioned a few here. This is the result of a ton of hard work by so many of our great staff and faculty. The work to ‘build the fall 2025 class’ started about this time last year, and these busy, hectic, exciting days that are filled with all these new, wonderful people – this is our payoff. My thanks to everyone who made this possible in ways both small and large. This is a good thing for UAF, º£½ÇÂÛ̳, Alaska, and for all of us. Thank you!
Here we go! This is going to be a great year!
Welcome back, Nanooks!
Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF's leadership team every week.