Nathanael Mooney, Campus Carrier staff writer
As waves of freshmen arrive at Berry for the new year, lots of work has to happen behind the scenes to make their welcome a great one. As of Tuesday, 619 freshmen will be joining the Berry community which is only one short of the admissions goal. Vice President of Enrollment Andrew Bressette is excited that Berry was able to hit their goal so easily.
“There are more students who wanted to come, but we are full residentially and we are full academically so I suspect we will have some students joining us in January,” Bressette said.
About 70% of the incoming class hails from Georgia, but 14 other states are represented. After Georgia, the next largest contingents are from are Florida, Alabama, Texas, Tennessee and North Carolina.
This year’s freshmen class is high quality academically. Bressette notes that the process for choosing students was more selective this year. Bressette compared Berry’s selectiveness to that of the University of Georgia.
“What we really like to talk about is what percentage of the entering class has a recalculated GPA of 3.6 or higher,” Bressette said. “We have 76% of the entering students with that really solid GPA.”
It is not only faculty that are getting the incoming students ready as some students have the ability to be a part of their onboarding process. Senior Kaitlyn Alonso, who works with Berry’s admissions, serves as a summer ambassador. Alonso gave campus tours to potential students over the summer.
“They get to go on a tour with a real life student, and [the guide] gets to talk about their experiences and give general info about the college,” Alonso said.
All of the student workers at admissions are responsible for giving tours. One of the most important things Alonso tries to emphasize is how good of an opportunity the LifeWorks program is. Sophomore Karen Ramirez, another summer ambassador and admission employee, was assigned to this site as a part of her guaranteed LifeWorks position. Admissions reached out to her to have an interview over Zoom, and a few weeks later she found out that she got the job.
Most of Ramirez’s tasks as a summer ambassador include setting the campus up for tours and helping out around the admissions office. One challenge for Ramirez is having to help families with difficult questions.
“The main challenge is getting calls from students who have heavy-loaded questions that I, as a student, cannot answer, such as someone’s specific financial situation, but those are things that can easily be solved by transferring them to admissions counselors,” Ramirez said.
While the challenges for the admission’s team could be solved easily, the same could not be said for the challenges Berry had to overcome. In October of 2023, the Department of Education first began delaying the updated launch of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Berry had already anticipated some challenges that simply come from using a new form, the delays however were much more of a surprise. FAFSA ended up launching Dec. 31, 2023. Even after the delayed launch, many users began to experience glitches and bugs on the website, pushing the timeline back even further. Bressette talks about how Berry was able to help give families accurate offers despite the disastrous launch.
“There was a tool on the Department of Education’s website that would estimate the student aid index,” Bressette said. “In the spring, when the FAFSA really broke down, we said if you use this tool and submit your data, we will give you a full financial aid packet based on that data and if your actual FAFSA data is within $1,000, we are going to honor it.”
The goal was to make the process as transparent as possible. Bressette identifies a lack of transparency as one of the contributing factors to why the FAFSA launch went awry. Two weeks ago, the Department of Education pushed back next year’s FAFSA from an October launch to a December launch. According to Bressette, Berry is already planning contingencies and options for if something similar happens again this year. Many of the tools Berry created for this year’s enrollment will help to make that planning easier.
Some of these plans include reaching out to families earlier and having better aid estimation software prepared. Bressette gave insight into admission’s planning.
“We are looking at some of the pathways we built last year and saying how we might use these if its really going to be a December launch,” Bressette said. “We know the path we did last year worked for us and we are ready to plug that back in and do it again.”