At UGA, Admissions is in part a numbers game, but probably not in the way you are thinking. Most of the time, when an admissions office is talking about numbers, they are referring to a GPA, a test score, the number of AP/DE classes, etc. But a big focus for me and my office is enrolling the right number of freshmen and transfers each year. While some universities are similar to us as far as enrolling a targeted number of students, some others (many of them large publics) have more flexibility in their enrollment numbers. And to be clear, when I talk about enrolling students, I am talking about the students who will be on campus and in class when mid-August rolls around. I am not talking about admits or deposits, but actual students taking classes for Fall 2026.
First-Year Students
For First-Year enrollment, our first goal is to make sure our freshmen have a good overall student experience when they start at UGA. This means that we work closely with UGA’s University Housing office to make sure there are spaces in our residence halls for every student. Secondly, the university wants to make sure that students are able to graduate in 4 years, so we focus on making sure there is course availability, to the point that class sessions are added as needed leading up to the semester. UGA also monitors the needs of the students personal well being, so the opening of both a new residence hall and a new dining, learning and well-being center will occur this summer. We can’t promise everything (parking will always be a challenge), but UGA works to make sure a student’s time on campus is memorable. But back to numbers, admissions is tasked with enrolling roughly 6,250 freshman this year, with little wiggle room. In order to do this, we need to project out how many students will accept our offer of admission, focus on keeping the 80% in-state/20% out-of-state numbers on track, and plan of a small number of students who deposit and then change their mind. In-State students say yes to us (deposit) at a much higher rate than out-of-state students, and students from different states also respond differently. As such, we need to be careful that we don’t over-enroll our class due to making too many offers. For the past two years, we have used the wait-list in May and June to allow us to get to the desired enrollment numbers without going over. Our Fall 2025 enrollment target was between 6,200 and 6,225 freshmen, and we enrolled 6,216 students. We will continue to use the wait-list to make sure we enroll the correct number of freshman but do not go over that number. We have over 51,400 applicants and we will enroll 6,250 students (sorry, no admit numbers at this time), so admission offers will be tight. Most students who are not admitted (or their parents) look for a reason they were not admitted, and they sometimes receive bad information. Regardless of what you hear on admissions forums, we do not limit admission by region, by county or by high school, and we do not use gender, race, ethnicity or legacy in our review. In addition, we do not use “yield protection”, as we admit students who we believe are the strongest in our applicant pool and hope they will enroll. Please know that a denial is not because you are a bad student/applicant, but that we just have an overwhelming number of great students interested in UGA.
Transfer Students
For transfer students, while there is not the issue of making sure of housing spots, there are still the other issues of making sure classes are available, well being is prioritized, and the overall student experience is our focus. As such, we need to manage the size of the overall enrolling transfer class, especially for summer and fall. We review students the same for summer/fall vs. spring, but this year had a much larger number of applicants for summer/fall than for spring, even when taking into account the space available in our transfer class. UGA enrolls about 3,100 or so transfer students a year (so roughly one new transfer for every new freshman), and about 67% of those will start in summer/fall. In order to better control the size of the enrolling transfer students, we will continue with our academic and holistic review process, and I also expect we will have a transfer wait-list to better hit the target enrollment number for each semester.
I hope this helps with understanding our admission process, and Go Dawgs!