Applications to St. John’s are way up

While local news is full of the controversy over St. John’s University’s plan to build a 485-bed dormitory on a residential block of Jamaica Estates, the business headline is “St. John’s blessed.”
According to a recently published report, St. John’s University scored double-digit gains in freshman applications for fall 2008, more than three times the increase for any other private college.
Dominic Sienna, a spokesperson for the university told The Queens Courier that, by the end of February, more than 37,100 freshmen had applied to the Catholic university, which has its main campus in Jamaica - a 34 percent increase over the previous year and significantly higher than what had been reported in mid-February.
The figure is roughly four times the 8.5 percent increase in applications from last year over 2006.
The “St. John’s Gunman” incident last September actually boosted applications, according to university spokesperson Beth Evans. “Parents saw it as reassurance” that the school was secure, she said.
With financial aid packages averaging almost 84 percent of the $26,200 tuition, “the financial aid package really clinched it for me,” an applicant is quoted as saying.
The school also reportedly credits the jump in applications to “aggressive efforts to attract students in faraway states like California, Texas, Florida and Virginia.” It has also increased “international outreach” in China, India, Korea and Japan, as well as Europe and Central America, the report said.
With an investment of $47 million in recent improvements, and new buildings projected for 2009, the article in a recent edition of Crain’s New York Business also mentions that St. John’s has been “refurbishing and expanding the number of residence halls for out-of-town students.”
However, the article claims that St. John’s “only intends to grow its freshman class by about 3 percent.”
According to Sienna, the freshman class is currently 3,162, so “we’re figuring on about 90 to 100 more” first-year students for 2009.
Kevin Forrestal, president of the Hillcrest Estates Civic Association, has little faith in the report. “Historically, when they said no increase, enrollment went up, so I expect rather more than 3 percent.”