Missionary age change less a factor than originally predicted
Due to the missionary age change in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Oct. 2012, many USU officials and students expected the number of students enrolling at the school to drop exponentially.
Prior to this change, male churchgoers could go on missions when they turned 19, and women could go at the age of 21. This changed last fall when the age requirement was lowered to 18 for men and 19 for women.
USU President Stan Albrecht said the university had expected to lose between 1,250 to 1,450 students this fall, but due to strategies put in place to enroll more students, USU is only short about 500 students.
Vice President of Student Services James Morales has led the effort to combat the expected problem and is involved in the implemented strategies. He has put together a plan that examines students in the lower and upper divisions, undergraduates and graduate students and in-state and out-of-state students. By looking at these different categories, Morales is working to produce a plan to find a productive approach to USU enrollment.
“After the announcement was made, I asked James and his team to put together a strategy for responding,” Albrecht said. “He was working very close with the legislature to get a bill passed that allows us to recruit out-of-state students at in-state tuition rates for a period of time, as long as we are recruiting higher-end students, so we’ve offset most of the serious revenue impacts that would be followed by budget cuts.”
Albrecht said this has caused the average applicant index score for out-of-state students to rise 12 points above the average score of resident students.
However, Albrecht said these strategies were only able to be implemented because the bill didn’t pass until March. By that time, most out-of-state students had already decided where they were going to attend school in the fall.
Albrecht said the university did all it could to prepare for the fall 2013 semester. He said it will be easier to take more steps during the 2013-14 school semesters because it has been almost a year since the administration had to strategize and plan in order to avoid budget cuts.
“The freshman class will be down a bit, but not down near as much as it otherwise would have been,” Albrecht said. “The freshman class will be more diverse because we let more out-of-state students in as part of that freshman class.”
Albrecht said the university will deal with changes when the missionaries return.
“And then, of course, freshman classes in the future will be quite different because we’ll be dealing with 20-year-old freshmen as opposed to 18-year-old freshmen,” Albrecht said. “We’re doing a lot of thinking about how that changes the culture of this institution and how it affects where students live. It’s going to affect things like what the proportion of our students are married, or which students are parents before they graduate. All of these things are things that we are building into our model as we’re going forward.”
Harley Blake, an undeclared sophomore, said she thinks there will be a lot more students going on missions now that they can go earlier. She did expect there to be fewer students this year, but she thinks it won’t affect USU for too long.
“I think it’ll even out soon, so I don’t think it’ll be that big of a deal,” she said. “Maybe this year and the next year, but I think it’ll even out.”
Shandy Vickers, a junior studying child psychology, is leaving on a mission in January but has plans to come back to USU after she returns. She said she expected to see fewer freshman as well, with significantly fewer girls.
“I have five of my best friends going on a mission right after I’m going, and I just think that there are so many more girls, it seems like they are all going on missions at a younger age,” Vickers said.
Vickers always wanted to go on a mission but said once she got to college, she loved it so much that she didn’t want to leave. With missionaries being able to go at a younger age, she thinks they’d be more likely to go on a mission first before entering the college scene.
“I was expecting fewer of the young 18-year-olds,” said Sam Hurst, a junior studying biology. “I didn’t serve a mission, so I wasn’t expecting a lot of people my age just because of the age change. It’s not affecting my experience a whole lot. I mean, I still know people that are my age here, but otherwise I haven’t seen a lot of change.”