University of Victoria could break student enrolment records this fall.

A total of 16,647 undergraduate students have registered and more than 2,000 graduate students have still to register.

“But until that first day of class it’s still a guessing game,” said Matt Stiegemeyer, UVic’s manager of student marketing and communications.

The previous record was set four years ago when 19,475 students registered at the university.

A bumper crop of first-year students under the age of 19 is boosting enrolment numbers.

The university has set aside 1,000 beds in student residences for the under-19 students, but expects another 1,000 in the younger group will find accommodation elsewhere.

As of Aug. 1 there were 2,850 first-year students registered, up eight per cent from 2008.

A change in recruiting tactics, including placing ads on Internet social networking site Facebook, as well as an emphasis on personal contact with prospective students has contributed to the increased numbers, Stiegemeyer said.

For years the university had many students arrive through two-year university transfer programs.

But as B.C. colleges reinvented themselves as universities, UVic has seen a dramatic drop, 38 per cent, in students arriving through the transfer route in the past five years.

With more than 70 per cent of UVic’s students coming from outside Greater Victoria, UVic recruiters re-vamped their strategies two years ago, assigning staff to cover high schools in specific regions and to focus on maintaining personal contact with prospective students.

In addition to placing ads on Facebook in the spring and fall last year (prompting over 7,000 responses), recruiters made sure not just to approach high schools in early spring to drum up interest but to head back in June when it was time for students to register for university.

“It was like ‘I’m coming to your town, let’s sit down’ versus ‘Here’s a website and a book,’” Stiegemeyer said about the face-to-face approach.

The new strategy is working: the number of students going directly from high school to UVic has increased 30 per cent. As well, the number of returning undergraduate students is up three per cent this year, as is the number of new undergraduate students, up 4.7 per cent.

Stiegemeyer is happy with the results.

“It certainly seems at this early stage that some of these efforts have paid off.”

editor@vicnews.com