Ole Miss Ambassador Linda Ohairwe leads prospective students and families down Business Row during a campus tour Thursday. DM Photo | Cady Herring
With the recent success of the Ole Miss football team and accompanying publicity, the university is becoming a place of interest for prospective students.
Amanda Barr, program coordinator for the office of admissions, said before the Alabama football game there was a total of 148 students who came to visit the university, 118 of whom toured Friday before the game. In the two weeks following the Alabama game, 584 students visited the university. The numbers of visiting students have increased from the same time last year, and Barr expects the numbers to continue to increase.
Danny Blanton, director of public relations for the university, said the publicity from ESPN’s College GameDay coming for the first time to campus gave a national audience a chance to see the beauty of the Grove and the university.
“The exposure that we are getting from this is great, and it’s causing people to recognize Ole Miss and look at Ole Miss when they may not have looked at it before,” he said.
Blanton said we should look toward Katy Perry as an example of the type of positive publicity we are receiving that can benefit the university, especially with the tweets and Instagram posts that were viewed by her almost 60 million followers.
“If you look at the demographic that it’s going to reach, there’s a lot of prospective students from all over the country,” he said. “That does have an influence on people.”
Blanton said the exposure is not coming just from our football program but from the success of both the university’s athletic programs and academia.
“It’s been a trend that has been ongoing for five years, if not a decade,” Blanton said. “This is only going to add to that historic growth.”
Blanton feels the success of athletics is not the defining factor that is causing people to choose Ole Miss but feels it’s a great way to provide a gateway for the university to showcase the strengths of the university’s programs.
“We’ve got a nationally ranked football team, but we also have the number four accounting school in the nation,” Blanton said. “We’ve got one of the top 10 pharmacy schools in the nation, and our engineering school has grown by 145 percent over the last 10 years.”
Blanton said each of the university’s programs are continuing to bring in impressive freshmen classes and is not worried the added publicity will bring in the wrong type of student.
“Time will tell if that trend changes,” Blanton said. “But the trend we are seeing now is not only is our freshman class continuing to grow, but it’s growing with the best of the best.”
Blanton also said, however, that the more success a program has the more other programs and people want to derail that success.
Blanton encourages students to be aware of their everyday actions and to monitor what they are saying on social media because we are under a microscope because of our history.
“When people say Mississippi, there is a certain stigma that goes along with it,” Blanton said. “There is always the potential of that happening; we just have to ask students to be mindful of that.”
Blanton said the university is always looking to accommodate the new students that they are receiving. He said there is about $240 million of construction going on throughout campus. This includes building new academic buildings, research facilities and residence halls.
“We’ve got to make sure that we maintain the facilities and the resources on campus to allow them to receive the quality education that they are coming here for, and that’s what we are committed to,” Blanton said.
Blanton said even though there is an increase of interest in enrolling in the university, there will not be a change to an exclusive admissions process in the future. He said the university has an obligation to uphold.
“We are the flagship university of the state of Mississippi,” Blanton said. “With that status comes a commitment to educating the people of the state of Mississippi.”
John Poland, a prospective high school student from Clarksville, Tennessee, said, even though he has a few family ties to the university, there is definitely some hype building up around the university due to the success of the football team.
“There are a bunch of people at my school right now who are applying to Ole Miss, and they are looking at it because of football,” Poland said. “There are a bunch of schools looking at Ole Miss because of that.”
McClure Poland, mother of John Poland, said the excitement surrounding the university is both positive and powerful.
“I think it brings interest,” she said. “People that wouldn’t normally think about Ole Miss, they hear about the football program and everything, and it gets everyone excited.”
Blanton said the interest in admissions was never low or stagnant and feels the university would still see growth even if we were a six and six team. In addition, he feels it is exciting to see that there is a spark of interest in the university because of the national contribution of GameDay.
“Raising the profile of the university so people can learn more about the university and see what the university has to offer is a great thing,” Blanton said. “And we are excited about that.”
