By Ashley Stewart
UW Newslab

While colleges and universities nationwide report declines in enrollment, University of Washington Bothell officials said their incoming class is bigger than ever. The 25-year-old branch campus has more than doubled enrollment during the past five years – making the jump to nearly 5,000 students.

Laura Mansfield, director of communications at UW Bothell, credits the university’s mission to create access to higher education for a diverse group of students.

“We place a great deal of emphasis on diversity,” Mansfield said. “We pride ourselves on making college possible and want to be a place where first generation students can come.”

It shows, she said, in UW Bothell’s most recent incoming class. More than 51 percent of students who enrolled this fall were the first in their families to attend college. The university’s main campus in Seattle, by comparison, reported 16.5 percent of freshmen entering in 2013 had parents who never went to college.

Each of the two University of Washington branch campus’s – UW Bothell and UW Tacoma – were founded to provide access for students who live outside Seattle.

“It’s a key part of our mission to serve students from north King and Snohomish [counties],” Mansfield said.

Students from the two counties make up more than 90 percent of the school’s student population – 55 percent from King County and 35 percent from Snohomish County. More than 740 students who enrolled for the first time last fall are transfer students, mostly from Bellevue College, Cascadia College, Edmonds Community College, Everett Community College and North Seattle College.

But Quinn Brown, a recent UW Bothell graduate, said the campuses’ biggest draw is a UW degree with less competition in admissions.

“More people will apply as UW Seattle becomes harder and harder to get into,” said Brown.

Unlike other branch-college systems the University of California system, degrees from campuses within the University of Washington aren’t labeled differently – a student who graduates from a campus with less-competitive admissions will get the same degree as students from its main campus.

Although students can get the same degree, they don’t have access to the same degree programs as the larger campus. UW Bothell has about 35 majors and most degree programs within the university system don’t overlap, Mansfield said.

“What we hope is that students are finding the best fit for them,” Mansfield said. “Faculty really pride themselves on knowing students, smaller class sizes and a different experience with vast support.”

The school offers fewer majors, but more night classes and other options for non-traditional students – those who may have delayed college, work full-time, attend school part-time, or have dependents.

“Seattle [UW Campus] is a bit more constrained in how they can grow,” Mansfield said. “We have more room to grow in different ways to accommodate students.”

As UW Bothell grows to accommodate more students, the school seems to be getting more diverse.

While less than half of the school’s total population are students of color, they made up nearly 70 percent of Bothell’s incoming freshman – including 37 percent Asian-American, 15 percent Hispanic, 7 percent African-American, with an additional 7 percent of students identifying themselves with two or more races.

An increase for most ethnic minorities across UW-Bothell’s total population.

“We started out slowly, now we’ve greatly accelerated,” she said. “Our hope is that we can continue to provide college access with vast support for diverse groups of students.”

Ashley Stewart is a student with the University of Washington News Lab.