LA GRANDE — Enrollment at Eastern Oregon University is up over the previous year, welcome news for university officials.

EOU officials also were cheered by news that the university is retaining a larger number of its freshmen students, a year after launching efforts to increase retention.

EOU’s fall student headcount is 2,954, a 2.7% increase over the previous fall’s 2,876. The count includes students who are taking online courses through the university. Students also are taking more credit hours: That number has grown by 4.4% over the last academic year.

Additionally, students are taking more credit hours; that number has grown by 4.4% over fall 2023.

The university’s enrollment was boosted by an increase in the number of freshmen on campus and by an 8% jump in students taking graduate classes. Tim Seydel, the university’s vice president for advancement, gave credit to graduate offerings at EOU, including a new program in behavioral health, for some of that increase.

And the university’s retention number, which measures the number of freshmen who return for their sophomore year, jumped to 70.6%, up from 68.2% last year.

Increasing student retention has been a priority for EOU President Kelly Ryan since she started her job in July 2023.

“As a rural-serving institution, it’s particularly important that we do more to uplift our students who are here and to help them see the reasons to stay, rather than the reasons to go,” she said in a recent interview.

EOU’s retention effort has focused on two levels: The first has been to identify barriers preventing students from returning to school — working to ensure that students could register for required classes in a timely manner, for example, or making sure they understand financial-aid options.

The development of the Mountaineer Information Center on campus, a one-stop location for students in Inlow Hall, was part of that effort.

But the retention effort has had another side as well: an effort to make campus life more engaging, approachable and — for lack of a better word — friendly. Ryan helped lead that charge, mixing with students and playing games with them during campus activities.

“One of the things that we really needed to focus on was our campus vitality,” she said. The campus activities and the games with students were “part of a larger campaign for me to work on making this campus just more engaging. One of my favorite things about going to college myself was meeting people who weren’t like me, just kind of growing as a person. It didn’t mean that every value I had changed or anything like that, but certainly life is more interesting because of the people we meet. So just lowering the bar and creating more fun spaces, because college is hard, but it’s also supposed to be fun.”

She gave credit for that work to EOU’s faculty and staff: “We have amazing faculty and staff who take time to make connections that are really meaningful to our students.”

But students are making it work as well, she said: “We just have people thirsty for their own change and their own development. … I think some of our students are seeing through that haze of misinformation about the value of a college degree and they’re applying themselves and they’re setting goals and they’re meeting people like themselves who want to do that same thing.”

Plenty of work remains to drive EOU’s retention number, Ryan said, including boosting career-based learning options and increasing financial-aid resources. The cost of college is the No. 1 reason why students leave, she said.

“My whole goal in serving is seeing more people with degrees in Eastern Oregon, because I know that that’s an engine of economic development — and also just better life outcomes when we have more people with degrees.”