Quarterly Updates
The 161st Year Begins
On Aug. 25, President Simpson welcomed members of the class of 2010 and their parents in a program in the Center for the Arts Mainstage theater that combined academic pomp, musical numbers by the a cappella Buffalo Chips, and brief remarks by student speakers, Provost Satish Tripathi and Tracy Gregg, associate professor of geology. As Simpson encouraged the audience of incoming students to look carefully at the opportunities UB offers, he noted particularly UB’s research excellence, its top-notch faculty—“who are making the conversation, not reporting on the conversation of others”—and its international connections, promising that “those prepared in the future to understand and interact with other cultures will have an advantage.”
Enrollment in the class of 2010 is projected to be 3,340 (final figures are not yet available), drawn from 19,351 applicants. The class is 53 percent male and 47 percent female. While most of the class (95 percent) comes from New York State, 28 other states and 30 countries are represented among the freshmen. The mean high school average of the new class was 92; 76 percent of UB’s new undergraduates ranked in the top quarter of their high school classes. UB also enrolled 1,550 transfer students for the start of the 2006-07 academic year.