Enrollment remained relatively steady as 205 more freshmen enrolled at Midwestern State University than last fall, resulting in a slight decrease in total enrollment, which dropped from 5,916 students in 2012 to 5,870 as of Sept. 18 when the official headcount was posted.
Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management Keith Lamb said the official numbers are close to what administrators predicted for this year’s budget, which was drafted around the assumption that enrollment would total 5,900 students, 30 more than the actual figure.
“We knew we needed an increase in the freshman class of around 230 to 250 students to remain even, so our budget target was 5,900 students,” Lamb said. “We are within 30 students of that goal, so we are half a percent away from budget.”
Lamb said he is happy with enrollment remaining flat after the university endured three years of steady decline in student population since 2010.
“We had two years of fairly large decreases and it was very very hard, financially, to make budget. We were able to, but it was very difficult,” Lamb said. “This year we were able to make budget without increasing student tuition.”
Lamb said the average student should be concerned with enrollment because a drop usually results in an increased tuition rate because that is the single largest portion of a school’s funding.
“If enrollment continues to go down, revenue goes down and you have to do two things,” Lamb said. “You have to cut expenses and you have to increase revenue. Fortunately, we did not increase tuition this year, but that trend cannot go on forever with low enrollment. That’s one reason the average student should be interested in enrollment.”
University President Jesse Rogers said new initiatives to increase recruitment have been instituted to bring in more students to replace last year’s large number of graduates.
“We were not bringing in larger freshman classes to replace those high graduation rates,” Rogers said. “So we’ve got to change our recruiting methodology.”
OTHER UNIVERSITIES
Rogers said the competition between universities to recruit quality students is growing more fierce as shifts in demographics are taking place in Texas.
“Kids are struggling to go to college. Demographics are changing, the college growing rate is flat in Texas,” Rogers said, “so in order to get good students here that are prepared to go to college and can pass, all universities from A&M and Texas Tech to Midwestern State are recruiting qualified students as hard as we can. We have a lot of competition out there.”
Despite Rogers’ claim that enrollment in Texas has flattened, schools such as Texas Tech and West Texas A&M are touting record enrollment numbers.
According to a press release, West Texas A&M had its highest enrollment ever this fall.
“This year’s enrollment increase continues a trend of increasing our student body every year since 2006,” Dan Garcia, vice president for enrollment management at West Texas A&M, said.
Another press release from Texas Tech boasted record enrollment figures for the fourth consecutive fall semester.
“Once again, a record number of students are attending Texas Tech University for their education,” Lawrence Schovanec, interim president at Texas Tech, said.
Another enrollment record was set at the University of North Texas according to a press release that indicated an increase of 385 students from the previous year.
A report from the Higher Education Coordinating Board projected enrollment in the Metroplex Region for universities to be increasing 3.39 percent while, in the same report, MSU had a projected 1.22 percent increase.
Rogers said he raised admission standards in 2006 so MSU could bring in more qualified students than before. This led to a decrease in recruitment, but resulted in a higher graduation rate than before.
“We did the right thing by raising our admission standards. Our graduation rate went up, which is going to be, in the long term, a very good move,” Rogers said. “We have an obligation to bring students in who have something in their background that will indicate to us that they can do collegiate-level work, and that they don’t need to do developmental work before they come here.”
Lamb said the administration has put more effort into recruitment to combat the rising graduation rate.
“That’s a recipe for decline, when you’re exiting more than what you’re bringing in,” Lamb said. “We want our students to graduate, that’s the whole purpose, but we need to do a better job bringing them in, so this year we did do a better job bringing students in. If we repeat that, then yes, next year we will go just above 6,000 if we have a similar-sized class.”
RECRUITMENT
Lamb said one of the key problems with recruitment is the lack of awareness about MSU.
“The problem that we have is that people don’t know we’re here,” Lamb said. “When people come here for tours, we have a fairly high conversion rate. Once we get eyes turned towards us, we do okay.”
Lamb said the administration knew about the need to reach out to more prospective students, but they were simply held back by a lack of funding.
“We needed resources allocated to recruit. We employed a social media person this year in our division for the first time because we wanted to interact with students and prospective students through social media,” Lamb said. “So there were a whole lot of things that we weren’t doing, but a lot of that had to do with funding. Not with the lack of knowledge in what to do.”
Rogers said he recognized the need to get the university’s name out to prospective students because once they get here, he said he is confident that they will consider enrolling.
“When students come to visit Midwestern, they’re more than likely, in our experiences, to enroll here,” Rogers said. “We’ve just got to get more aggressive in building that freshman class, and this is the first year that we’ve done that.”
Rogers said the administration has become smarter at recruiting by concentrating its efforts in places that have the highest yield of incoming freshmen.
“We have very few students from Oklahoma,” Rogers said. “Oklahoma’s done so much to keep students at home, they just don’t cross the Red River. We don’t have a 360-degree growing radius, we have a 180-degree radius.”
Lamb said a good opportunity for recruitment lies within that 180-degree radius in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area.
“Where we thought we would make the most impact in stabilizing enrollment is in Dallas/Fort Worth,” Lamb said. “You have a very very large, rapidly growing metropolitan area just to our southeast, so there’s easy access. In fact, 39 percent of our freshman class is from DFW, which is very very large.”
RETENTION
Lamb said beyond recruitment, the administrators need to also focus on retaining current students. He said his data on retention shows that it has stayed relatively flat for the last 10 years.
“We need to take a hard look at retention and see what we can do to improve it,” Lamb said.
Now that more emphasis has been put on recruitment, Rogers said he agrees that retention is the next aspect of enrollment that the administration will need to look at.
“I’m not happy with it, nobody is,” Rogers said. “We are putting in plans now, and I’m not exactly sure what they will be, but we’re going to do everything we can to increase our retention rate.”
Rogers said establishing a connection between students and the campus is one way to increase retention.
“We need to do something to get them connected to the university. If I lived in Forth Worth and came to Midwestern, I would come back if I made good friends, if I marched in the band, if I played in theater, if I played a sport, if I wrote for The Wichitan, if I had a connection to the school,” Rogers said. “We’ve got to do everything we can to achieve all those things. We need students here who make friends and feel connected to the university through some kind of program.”