Despite numerous recruitment efforts intended to increase enrollment, during the second week of classes, before official 12th-class-day figures are available, freshman and transfer enrollment is unofficially up 223 students from last fall, causing overall attendance to be relatively flat, slightly below the goal of 5,900 students.
“To stay flat at 5,900 we needed about 250 additional freshman over the amount we had last year,” Keith Lamb, vice president of enrollment and student affairs, said. “We ended up with about 230 additional freshman which will level us out.”
University President Jesse Rogers said, “It looks like our freshman class this year is going to be about 200 larger than it was last year. This is the largest freshman class we’ve had since 1991.”
And he said, in general, university officials have nearly accomplished short-term recruitment goals.
“Our goal this year was 5,900 so a little bit, I think, less than last year. The thing is, we’ve had another huge graduating class. And what got our enrollment down is that we raised admission standards to get into Midwestern in 2006 and 2011, and that cut down on the size of the freshman class, but we succeeded in doing what we set out to do and that was increase the graduation rate. All of a sudden one year our graduation numbers go up by 350 to 400 students above the 10-year average for four years.”
Lamb agreed that the decrease in overall enrollment was partly due to high graduation rates in the last few years.
“We are graduating these large classes causing us to go from 6,400 to 5,900 students,” Lamb said. ”We know we needed to be very aggressive this year. We knew we needed a larger class to level off and that’s what we have done.”
While the revenue expected from the incoming students, approximately $1.3 million, will aid in future enrollment and campus innovations university officials said they still need to increase enrollment to meet budgetary demands.
Rogers said administrators are taking a hard look at retention numbers with freshman because retaining those numbers is vital. He said MSU keeps about 70 percent of its freshman class but ought to be keeping 80 to 85 percent of the freshman class.
Rogers also said MSU actually got an increase of $340,000 in cash from the state for credit-hour production, money that will ease other decreases in the income.
“The previous two years we had $2.3 million cut each year, and then there were other cuts also,” he said. “With the enrollment coming down we’ve had a couple of very tight years, but we had reserves, and we had a lot of private gifts that were undesignated, so we’ve been able to tighten up and get through it.”
“In the end, the school ends up with more than we spent in recruiting,” Lamb said. “If students continue all four years then we will have much more than that.”
