Baldwin City ? Baker University freshmen Carson Ferren and Sydnie Hanson didn’t expect to enroll at a school so close to their Overland Park homes when they started looking at where they would spend their college years.

“I thought I would go farther from home,” Hansen said as she walked Friday from class to class on Baker’s Baldwin City campus. “I play basketball. I came here on a visit and absolutely fell in love with the campus. I love the basketball team and the coach. I felt like it would be a good fit for me.”

Ferren said she was looking at a school in Nashville, Tenn., before visiting Baker. Baker’s quality elementary education program and a choir scholarship convinced her the Baldwin City campus was right for her, she said.

After their first week of classes, both freshmen said they were now happy they decided to stay closer to home.

The two coeds are among the 228 members of Baker’s freshman class, a number exceeding the university’s target of 220, said Kevin Kropf, Baker’s senior director of admissions. The university’s enrollment would increase by about 20 students this year on the Baldwin City campus for a total of about 900, but enrollment won’t be official until the 20th day of classes, Kropf said.

This year’s freshmen enrollment coupled with last year’s class of 234 freshmen, which had 24 more students than the fall of the 2012 freshman class, indicates enrollment is recovering from a five-year recession-related slump.

It also is an indication that the university has refined its enrollment approach to the point it can avoid slumps after a one-year spike, such as the slide after Baker enrolled 255 freshmen in 2009 with the school’s introduction of wrestling and bowling.

“That’s what I’ve tried to do since I’ve been here, to have systems in place where we can ballpark where we will be every year, ” Kropf said. “We’ve focused on how to get to programs that are sustainable year in and year out.”

As always, this year’s freshman class is heavily represented by students from Douglas, Johnson and other northeast Kansas counties and those across the state line in Missouri, but Kropf said there were differences, even within that local geographic catchment.

“This year, there’s a few more from Wyandotte County and Jackson County (Mo.). There’s a few more international students and a few more from distant places in the U.S.,” Kropf said.

Most of the students from more distant locations either have family connections to Baker or came to the school on sports scholarships, Kropf said. But he said this year’s newcomers also reflect the university’s commitment to greater diversity, which was one of the challenges the Board of Trustees presented Lynne Murray when she was selected at the school’s 29th president late last year.

This fall, 26 percent of new Baker students identified themselves as African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native American or other minority, Kropf said.

Lynne has suggested one way to increase diversity and increase enrollment was to recruit international students. Kropf said that effort has already started.

“We’ve had some groups in,” he said. “This year, we’re doing international travel for the first time in a long time.”

Baker did suffer one enrollment setback. Its 39 transfers was “down a little” from last fall, Kropf said. That’s related to a downward trend in enrollment at the state’s community colleges and one that doesn’t seem to be turning around.

“We’re not going to adjust our goal a whole lot moving forward,” he said.

Continued enrollment success would put the squeeze on campus housing, although the school’s fraternities and sororities would provide some relief, Kropf said.

“At 1,000, we would be squeezed,” he said. “We don’t want to put people in nooks and crannies. We want our students to have a quality campus residential life. At some point, we would have to limit who we can have come here or build more rooms.”