Spring enrollment drops four students as numbers fall from 5,718 in the spring of 2017 to 5,714 in the spring of this year. However, semester credit hours continue to increase despite the lower number of students.

Despite the drop in the total number of students, Keith Lamb, vice president of student affairs and enrollment management, said the more important number to address is the increase in semester credit hour production.

“As a student, most of the fees you pay are per semester credit hour so what’s more important to our semester budget is credit hour production,” Lamb said. “And were up in semester credit hour production.”

The hours of spring 2018 have increased from 66,462 from last spring’s 65,293.

“The reason were more or less flat on headcount and up on credit hours is a function of two things. One is winter mini,” Lamb said. “We did not offer that last year this year. We offered it and that credit hour production counts towards the spring. And the other reason is our average low spring is up just slightly.”

The difference between fall and spring admissions is there is a shorter period of time to sign up.

“The main difference between fall and spring admissions is that there’s just a shorter turnaround time,” Gayonne Beavers, director of admissions, said. “We have to communicate in a much faster way because they don’t have as much time to make a decision.”

Madison Scogin, computer science senior, has been working as a tour guide for two and a half years. To her, there is a difference in the people who come to tour during for fall and spring.

“The tours for both the fall and the spring are the same format and set up, but in the fall we more so predominantly have transfer students that come because they are wanting to transfer in for the spring,” Scogin said. “We have a lot of football players, normally that’s when they do a lot of their recruiting because that’s when there season is coming.”

Admissions has started communicating with students in new ways.

“Something new that we have done within the last year is were communicating via text,” Beavers said. “So were trying to meet the students kinda where they are and the method that they prefer to communicate. And that seems to be making a difference in the amount of students that are attending our events.”

There has been a rise in the amount of students taking only online classes. This spring’s online semester hours were 8,897 compared to last spring’s 6,901.

“Online only students are only online and are not physically in any classes,” Lamb said. “This spring was 1,236 and last spring was 1,085 so we have had a nice increase in our online only.”

Additional reporting by Tyler Manning.