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Inside Furman is published monthly during the school year by the Furman University Department of Marketing and Public Relations. For story ideas, e-mail John Roberts, editor.
Looking for a few good men
The level of testosterone at Furman just got a bit higher.
No, it's not that the impending football season has everyone grunting and beating their chest. And Timmons Arena has no immediate plans to host a World Wrestling Federation event.
There are just more men on campus. A very few more. But it's a trend that the Admissions Office hopes will continue.
The Class of 2005 includes 331 men, roughly 46 percent of the first-year group. To compare, the Class 2004 had 306 men (44 percent), and the Class of 2003 enrolled 295 men (43 percent).
Overall, women outnumber the men in the student body 1,482 to 1,154.
"Men tend to be more vocationally minded than women, so fewer men are expressing an interest in liberal arts institutions. About 59 percent of students currently applying to liberal arts institutions are women," says Woody O'Cain, director of Admissions. "Also, there are just more women enrolling in college now than men. These are national trends. Furman is no exception."
O'Cain, who would like future Furman classes to be evenly split between the sexes, says his admissions team members are "putting a little extra effort" into recruiting men.
"Sometimes we feel like the Marines, we're looking for a few good men," says O'Cain.
In addition, the Class of 2005 includes a record number of African-Americans - 51, up from 42 last year. Admissions received 3,619 applications, the second highest in the school's history, while enrolling a freshman class of 718. The acceptance rate was 62 percent, compared to 59 percent last year and 65 percent in 1999.
Fifteen percent of the students in the Class of 2005 were valedictorians or salutatorians. The group also includes 31 class presidents. Sixty percent finished in the top 10 percent of their class. Their average SAT score is 1259, compared with 1258 last year and 1242 in 1999.
The flurry of construction activity on campus, the university's growing reputation for academic excellence, enhanced recruiting efforts, publicity generated by the Hollingsworth bequest and rising rankings in U.S. News & World Report are attracting more and brighter students to Furman, says O'Cain.
Domestically, the freshmen class represents 39 states and 10 foreign countries but most of Furman's new students continue to hail from South Carolina (28 percent) and surrounding states, Georgia (21 percent), Florida (8 percent), Tennessee (9 percent) and North Carolina (9 percent).
Included in this first-year group are students who made perfect scores on the verbal and math portion of the SAT, students who have 40 hours of college credit from the AP exam, a national champion in the martial art of Tae Kwon Do, two members of the Under-18 National Soccer Team, a national cheerleading champion, a musician who performed at Carnegie Hall and a student who spoke before a Congressional committee.