The admissions team at Grinnell College has increased their goal for students enrolling in the fall of 2026 from 460 students to 470 students.
This goal follows the graduation of the larger class of 2025 and the smaller class of 2029, resulting in a current student body of about 1600 students.
The admissions team, in collaboration with the Enrollment Planning Group and Admissions and Student Financial Aid Committee, decided on a goal of 470 students to try to return the Grinnell College student body to the size it has been historically, which is around 1675 students.
Brad Lindberg, associate vice president of institutional initiatives and enrollment, said that after the COVID-19 pandemic, the goal for incoming students fluctuated around 450 to 460 students due to the larger size of the 2025 graduating class.
In 2020, the College gave incoming students the option to wait until 2021 to start their first year at Grinnell.
“What that resulted in is a significant number of first-year students choosing to not come to Grinnell for a year, so we had a really big class of first year students coming in 2021,” Lindberg said. “That class graduated last year.”
There were fewer incoming students than usual in the fall of 2025. Lindberg said that the college had expected 450 students and only ended up getting around 412.
“We had a smaller international class than we had planned for,” Lindberg said.
Lindberg said that the College is also trying to retain the population of international students among the incoming class.
“As an enrollment division, we have a goal for 20% of our class to be from outside of the United States, and we will continue that goal moving forward,” he said. “It is important for the College, as an institution with a global lens, to try to get to that 20% of our students coming from outside of the United States.”
In an email to The S&B, Sarah Fischer, assistant vice president of admission, wrote that although there were fewer incoming international students in the fall of 2025, there have been many more international applicants this year.
She wrote that the admission team needs to remain attentive to the yield of international students.
“There is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now and changes in immigration policy could affect an international student’s ability and/or willingness to study in the U.S.,” she wrote.
Lindberg said that nothing about the Grinnell experience should significantly change with a larger student body.
“Having 10 extra students in the first year class will have some minimal impact,” Lindberg said. “It will impact tutorials, for example. We might have to add an extra tutorial.”
Fischer wrote that the admissions process will not be affected by the new enrollment goal.
“We will continue to read applications holistically, considering the applicant’s academic record, their writing ability, and contributions to their school and community,” Fischer wrote.
Paul Frost-Lau, associate director of housing operations, said that ResLife’s plan to introduce first-year only housing is part of the preparation for the increase in the incoming class’s size.
“Because of the first-year-only housing, we are able to accommodate the class size of 470 in our double and triple rooms,” Frost-Lau said.
Frost-Lau said that the first-year only housing model also helps to avoid reaching overcapacity, which has happened in the past.
“Now that we are doing the placement and setting things aside on the front end, I don’t envision us getting to that point,” Frost-Lau said.
Lindberg said that the admissions team plans to continue evaluating the size of the student body in order to decide on whether to continue admitting more students than usual in the future.
“We are going to reevaluate this every year depending on retention and graduation rates to ensure that the student body is the right size for Grinnell and that we have the right mix of students through the four classes,” he said.
“Our application pool this year is over 11,000 applications,” Lindberg said. “We have the strength in the application pool to bring in those extra 10 students to get to the class size we are looking for, and it will be a mix of both domestic and international students to keep to that 20-80 split.”
