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UMass Amherst Set To Begin New School Year

    The population of Amherst Massachusetts will swell by tens of thousands of people during the next several days as college students move in  for the start of a new school year.  WAMC”s Paul Tuthill reports

   The state’s flagship public university campus will welcome its most academically accomplished first year class in its history.  The roughly 45  hundred members of the UMass Amherst Class of 2016 had average SAT scores seven points higher than last year’s freshman class.  Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy said the university is attracting quality students from across the state and the country.

   Subbaswamy said he is continuing a strategy begun by his predecessor to increase revenue , by admitting more out of state students, who pay a higher tuition than Massachusetts residents.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.