Enrollment down from last year
Utah State University is bolstering its recruitment efforts both in and out of state in order to combat declining student enrollment.
The latest university headcount is 23,128, a 780-student dip from the fall 2004 count of 23,908, according to numbers released earlier this year.
“Everybody loses when enrollment is down,” said Katie Nielsen, assistant director of recruitment in the Admissions Office. Enrollment funds the classroom and is also the basis for state funding.
“Really, the future of the university is based on enrollment,” she said. Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies and Research Joyce Kinkead said there are many contributors to the drop, one being that 2004 had the lowest number of Utah high school graduates in 10 plus years. “There will be an upswing in the next few years, but the growth is largely in Hispanic students and other under-represented groups that are statistically less likely to attend college, requiring significant outreach to K-12 populations,” Kinkead said.
Enrollment of multicultural students at USU is starting to grow, said Moises Diaz, director of Multicultural Student Services.
“The growth is modest, but it’s there,” he said. “If we’ve increased 3 or 4 percent, that’s still favorable, especially in light of overall enrollment decreasing.”
Another contributor to low enrollment at USU is the increase in traditionally two-year colleges now offering four-year degrees, Kinkead said.
“The proliferation of programs has eroded our market share in the state,” she said. The change of Ricks College into four-year Brigham Young University-Idaho has had an especially big impact on USU, Nielsen said.
“Ricks was our main feeder school,” she said.
The decrease of students from Idaho has been tough on enrollment. Over the past three years, USU has lost more than 500 Idahoans, Kinkead said. She attributes the decline to both the increasing popularity of Brigham Young University-Idaho and House Bill 331, which requires an out-of-state student to have 60 credits or reside in Utah for three years before obtaining residency. USU student ambassador Kelsey Burns, a junior majoring in communicative disorders and deaf education, said she has noticed an increase in focus on Idaho recruitment.
Efforts are more concentrated and USU President Stan Albrecht is getting involved in some of the open houses, she said.
“He’s taken a personal interest in getting out out-of-state kids back,” she said. “How many universities presidents do you know who go out to the high schools?”
USU is also working to diversify recruitment efforts beyond Utah and Idaho out to other Western states such as Texas, Alaska, and Illinois, Kinkead said.
Nielsen said the admissions office is being more aggressive in its recruiting. The main focus now are multicultural, high-ability and out-of-state students, she said. Wider geographic areas of test scores are being purchased in order to find potential students.
“We’re doubling our prospective pool for the 2006 freshman class,” she said. The Admissions Office just redesigned their Web page, making it more student-friendly, Nielsen said. A new feature of the site includes “A-talk,” an instant messaging program that allows prospective students to chat with an ambassador or admissions employee any time during the day. The key is inspiring students to physically come check out USU, Nielsen said. “If we can get students on campus, the university sells itself,” she said. Unfortunately, USU received a lot of bad publicity last year relating to the 43 percent tuition increase, Kinkead said. “We had unintentional negative marketing. This was a real turn-off to prospective students,” she said.
USU is also under-resourced in its recruitment operations, Kinkead said. USU spends about $54 per student to recruit, while Weber spends $140 and University of Utah spends $280. The national average of four-year school recruitment spending per student is $516.
Other impacts on enrollment include more stringent requirements on international students by the federal government, Utah students’ dependency on financial aid and competitive graduate programs from other universities, Kinkead said.
-ashschiller@cc.usu.edu