CUNY Newswire

Lehman College welcomed nearly 3,000 new students to campus for the fall 2013 semester. While the numbers are early, preliminary data show it is the College’s strongest incoming class in two decades.

The Class of 2017 arrives with more community engagement and volunteer experience under their collective belt. They are honor roll students with strong academic records. They are award winners and all-around high achievers.

Within the new crop of first-year SEEK students, many graduated at the top of their class and were engaged in leadership roles inside and outside of school. Students like Isatou Gumaneh of Discovery High School who was valedictorian and received the Academic Excellence Award in Science, and trained concert pianist Ruby Cabuya, a graduate of LaGuardia High School and now a student in Lehman’s Macaulay Honors College.

Close to 600 of the new students are first-time freshmen and more than 600 are graduate students. There are close to 1,700 transfer students from both community colleges and senior colleges in the New York City region, ready to take the next step and complete their bachelor’s degrees. Lehman also welcomed one of its largest groups of international students.

Among the new class, the most popular majors continue to be nursing, social work, accounting, and business administration.

With a student body of close to 12,000, Lehman College continues to serve its immediate community. Most students are Bronx residents; they are Hispanic for the most part; and women outnumber the men, making up about two-thirds of the incoming class.

“These numbers and these data are a reflection of a campus-wide effort in the past several years to increase student success rates,” says Dr. Robert C. Troy, Vice President for Enrollment Management and Associate Provost.

“Our designation as a Tier 1 University and Top 40 Public School in the Northern Region in U.S. News & World Report’s 2014 Best Colleges Rankings report indicate that our hard work is paying off,” he continued.

The report also ranked Lehman as a Top 5 school in the northeast region—among both public and private universities—for students who had the least amount of debt at graduation.