Dive Brief:
- The State University of New York’s fall 2025 enrollment rose 2.9% over last year, marking the third straight year of growth at the public system after a decade of steady student losses.
- Enrollment in the 64-college system reached 387,363 students this fall. SUNY also experienced outsized first-time undergraduate enrollment growth this fall, with new students increasing by 3.1% to 70,401.
- However, SUNY's recent enrollment growth — up 6.5% since 2022 — is still well below the 500,000-student goal New York Gov. Kathy Hochul set that year.
Dive Insight:
From 2012 to 2022, SUNY's enrollment steadily declined, losing more than a fifth of its students. Hochul has made changing SUNY's fortunes, and the state’s public higher education more broadly, a policy priority since taking office in 2021.
SUNY Fall Enrollment
The university system lost roughly 100,000 students between fall 2012 and fall 2022.
In that time, New York made completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid a high school graduation requirement beginning in the 2024-25 academic year, a move SUNY supported publicly.
SUNY has also introduced direct admissions at community colleges and guaranteed admissions at its selective colleges. Direct admissions programs offer students college acceptance without them first needing to apply, whereas guaranteed admissions programs generally promise students a spot if they submit an application and meet certain conditions.
In fall 2025, headcounts at SUNY's 30 community colleges jumped 5% to 173,893 students. Their first-time enrollment also grew, rising 4.8% to reach 34,425 students.
Hochul on Tuesday partly attributed the enrollment growth at the system's community colleges to the SUNY Reconnect initiative, launched earlier this year.
The program, also known as the Opportunity Promise Scholarship, allows New York residents ages 25 to 55 with no prior degree to attend community college for free if they study certain high-demand fields, such as nursing and engineering.
As of Nov. 13, 5,608 people enrolled at SUNY community colleges through Reconnect, according to institutional data. Hochul's office said each student in the program saves an average of $2,000 per year.
Transfer enrollment also increased at SUNY in fall 2025, up 4.7% to 26,301 students.
Like overall enrollment, however, the number of transfer students, first-time students, and students at community colleges still fell well below 2015 numbers.
In contrast to SUNY's overall growth this year, international enrollment dipped amid federal attacks on foreign students and an increasingly complicated visa landscape.
Overall international enrollment at SUNY’s colleges declined 3.9% to 20,608 students.
The recently released annual Open Doors report found that international enrollment in the U.S. reached an all-time high in fall 2024. But its preliminary fall 2025 survey of 825 colleges shows their international enrollment dropped 1% this term, driven by a 12% decline in foreign graduate students.
SUNY's institutional data aligned with these findings. Declines were steepest at doctoral degree-granting universities, where enrollment fell 6.9% to 15,352 students. International graduate enrollment decreased 13.8% compared to fall 2024, according to Hochul's office.
Other institutional types — the system’s comprehensive and technology colleges — saw increases, though they only enroll a combined 2,216 international students.
