27-06-2025
Here's how much bigger Ricks College got when it became BYU-Idaho 25 years ago
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Last week marked the 25th anniversary of President Gordon B. Hinckley's announcement that Ricks College, a junior college in Rexburg, Idaho, would become Brigham Young University-Idaho.
The goal was to educate more students more fully, which raises a natural question: How many more students have studied at the university than would have been on campus if the school had remained a junior college?
Of course, there's no perfect answer. Ricks might have grown larger, for example, but we will never know. What we can do is see how many students did walk through the doors over the past quarter of a century.
Here's what we know (and saving the biggest number for last):
During the 1999-2000 school year, just before the major announcement by the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a total of 14,516 students enrolled at Ricks, according to Brett Sampson, managing director of University Relations at BYU-Idaho.
Last year, 32,090 students enrolled at BYU-Idaho.
In all, Sampson said that 199,647 students matriculated on the Rexburg campus between 2000-2025.
But remember, there has been another massive shift since that announcement — the addition of online learning.
If you include online students, BYU-Idaho enrolled 61,725 students last year.
BYU-Idaho began to offer online degrees in 2008. If Ricks had continued as a junior college, it may have added an online component. Maybe the online education era would have sparked a later move to university status, too, so that students could gain access to four-year degrees.
So, how many students have enrolled at BYU-Idaho since 2000?
It's important to note that one can't simply add up the yearly enrollments. You can't take 15,000 per year at Ricks and multiply it by 25 years, or 34,000 per year at BYU-Idaho and multiply that by 25, because the math in both cases would count some students two or three or four more times.
But here's what did actually happen:
BYU-Idaho now has had 272,126 different students matriculate on campus or online between 2000 and 2025, Sampson said.
That's more than a quarter of a million individuals in 25 years.
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