The College Fix

A few hundred more students enrolled than was estimated

Evergreen State College, rocked by student protests last year, is seeing higher enrollment numbers than its administration predicted earlier this year, though the school still remains well below the number of students for which it is funded.

Emily Kok, a public records officer at the school, told The College Fix via email that the number of freshmen at the Olympia, Wash.-based campus this fall semester is 309, and the total student headcount is 3,327.

Those numbers vary from several estimates made by Evergreen faculty and staff earlier this year.

In February, The College Fix reported that Evergreen President George Bridges told the campus that “the school’s 3,800 student population is predicted to hover at about 3,100 when the 2018-19 school year begins.”

Last month, in a post on the website Heterodox Academy, Evergreen biology professor Mike Paros stated that the school was anticipating an enrollment of around 2,800 students, with “less than 300 freshmen” attending.

Paros later updated that post after a representative from the school reached out to Heterodox Academy: “[Evergreen officials] expect around 350 freshmen to attend in the fall. Also, they expect 3000-3100 total full-time enrolled students in 2018,” the update read.

The school’s official numbers for this semester, in other words, are a mixed bag compared to its predictions: Around 50 less freshmen are attending than was estimated as late as last month, but the school still has around 200-300 more students total than was predicted several weeks ago.

Reached via phone on Wednesday afternoon, campus spokeswoman Allison Anderson told The College Fix: “We’re doing a little bit better than we predicted.”

“We knew enrollment was going to be down, but we came in a little higher than we expected,” Anderson said.

Current enrollment numbers at Evergreen are still greatly below what the school is funded for; as Paros noted in his post at Heterodox Academy, Evergreen State “is currently publicly funded for 4200 students.”

Evergreen’s troubles began last year when a biology professor there, Bret Weinstein, refused to leave the school’s campus during an anti-white “day of absence.”

Protests soon followed. Evergreen faculty demanded that Weinstein be punished for refusing to leave campus, and student mobs roamed the campus with improvised weapons. The school gained national attention during the uproar.

MORE: Evergreen State College faces $2.1M budget shortfall, cites enrollment drop

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