The University of Saskatchewan is trumpeting its latest enrolment numbers.
David Hannah, the associate vice-president of student affairs, says this marks the fifth consecutive year that enrollment has increased during the winter.
The school says 8.5 per cent of its current study body is Aboriginal.
However, Hannah notes there have been fluctuations in this enrollment over the past few years.
“The last couple of years we’ve actually seen a slight decline in the number of Aboriginal students,” he says. “We were sitting about 1,700 in 2010/11 and then saw a slight decline over the next two years and this winter they’ve come up again.”
He says those changes could be explained by the new aboriginal declaration forms that students are given to fill out.
Hannah explains some students may have tried to declare themselves Aboriginal but the information wasn’t properly recorded and so they were missed during the count.