The University’s undergraduate enrollment is holding steady as its minority populations rise, thanks in part to several ongoing recruitment efforts from the admissions department.

The University is now 8 percent African American and 7 percent Latino, Senior Vice President for Students and Enrollment Andrew Flagel announced at the faculty meeting on Oct. 7. He also said that the University admitted 624 students of color in 2016, with 137 students enrolling — up from 105 enrolled first-year students of color in 2014, according to an Oct. 10 Justice article.

“For several years, admissions at Brandeis has had a major effort underway to diversify our enrollment in a broad range of fronts, including increasing Brandeis’ reputation and name recognition across the country and around the world. This has resulted in much larger, more competitive and far more diverse applicant pools, including a very large increase in applications from under-represented students of color,” Dean of Admissions Jennifer Walker and Flagel wrote in a joint email to the Justice.

In order to bolster minority recruitment, the admissions team has built new and expanded relationships with community-based organizations that work with underrepresented minority students. Programs like Students Exploring and Embracing Diversity help promote steady minority population growth on campus, they added.

However, they explained, the Admissions department’s collaborative efforts with the larger University community is one of the most important methods of recruitment, especially in college fairs and student interviews. “As a small university, we are very dependent on our Brandeis community to support recruitment and outreach efforts, far more so than many of the much larger schools with which we compete,” they wrote. “The most powerful way our community can work towards our mutual goals of attracting more talented and diverse students to Brandeis is to support these efforts.”

Meanwhile, the University’s overall undergraduate enrollment has remained steady over the last few years, ranging between 3,550 and 3,650 students. Fall-entering first-year classes, on the other hand, have remained between 820 to 850 students, Flagel and Walker wrote. “Of course, shifts in enrollment through the first several weeks change from year to year — last year we had a smaller first year class, and a couple of years ago a very large class, but the expectation has remained in that range,” they said. “For the past few years the charge from Board of Trustees has been to maintain this enrollment range, although there will always be some year to year shifts.”

These statistics follow the Sept. 13 U.S. News and World Report rankings, which listed Brandeis as the 34th best university in the nation and the 36th best university in the nation for first-year retention rate, up from 42nd place in the 2016 guide. “In our experience, rankings have their largest role in attracting applicants. It may be that some portion of students ultimately factor ranking into their enrollment decision,” Walker and Flagel wrote. However, they added, “Brandeis applicants indicate much higher interest in substantive academic quality, particularly access to our exceptional faculty, than any other factor.”