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- Student Numbers Stay Steady, Recruitment Efforts Increase
For the past five years, the LSU College of Agriculture’s student population has hovered around 1,300, and the breakdown in what students study has stayed relatively steady. Animal sciences attracts the largest number of students with nearly 400. Natural resource ecology and management is second with close to 300.
Amanda Martin, director of recruitment and retention for the college, has developed a recruitment strategy aimed at reaching more students in a more personal way.
Martin and her team present or set up booths at high school college fairs, conferences, university-organized events and other off-campus venues. The college also hosted 800 prospective students and their families on campus during the 2016-2017 school year. Some of these students attended new on-campus recruiting events designed to give them an up-close look at the College of Agriculture and life on campus. The recruiting team also made more than 600 personal calls to prospective and admitted students. Martin is working with the college’s student ambassador team, the Les Voyageurs, to include them in the recruitment effort, and plans are to get alumni involved in recruiting as well.
With the new efforts, the college has seen an uptick in the number of students applying and admitted to the college for fall 2017.
Martin said recruiting plans for the 2017-2018 year include diversifying the way her team recruits to draw more students to some of the majors with lower numbers.
“We will focus on engaging high school students through interactive presentations at their schools in classes like biology and chemistry to showcase how science provides the foundation to everything we do in the agriculture industry,” she said.
The LSU AgCenter and the LSU College of Agriculture