The story of the university’s enrollment is a grim one.

This institution is bleeding money and students at a rate its administrators find alarming.

“Oh, everyone’s concerned about it,” SIU President Glenn Poshard said. “It’s been the major issue on people’s minds for a long time.”

Advertisement

The university created a new position – vice chancellor for enrollment management – to deal with the issue. Victoria Valle, who took the job six months ago, is one of several administrators with new ideas to fix the problem, which has plagued the university for more than a decade. The administrators’ ideas focus on everything from when students take required math and science courses to when, and how, the university contacts prospective recruits.

Enrollment peaked in 1991 at 24,869 students. By fall 2007, that number had fallen to 20,983. At an institution where tuition and fees make up one-fifth of the budget, this decline presents a serious financial problem.

State funds offer little relief. While the state supplied nearly 70 percent of SIUC’s budget in 1968, it provides roughly 32 percent today.

Students who do enroll often don’t stay. From fall 2006 to fall 2007, the university lost 671 of 2,222 first-time, full-time freshmen. According to the university’s tuition and fees estimator, each of those students would have paid more than $3,400 per semester in tuition and fees, meaning the university lost more than $2.3 million for one semester.

Tuition and fees continue to rise as administrators struggle to fix crumbling buildings, supplement programs and research, maintain competitive salaries for faculty and staff, build a new football stadium, renovate an arena and keep the lights on.

Valle said her department would begin purchasing the names of high school sophomores from testing agencies and sending them a combination of e-mail and print messages. This means the university would market itself in more ways to more students, particularly younger students, than ever before.

Valle added that her $200,000 budget would be spent carefully.

Advertisement*

“We have to be very mindful of every penny that we spend on recruitment, every piece of paper that we print, every e-mail message,” Valle said. “We’ve got to refine it. We’ve got to make sure we’re doing our job.”

Valle said administrators would analyze survey responses from students who left the university and begin polling those who are still here. This data would offer valuable insight into why students leave, she said.

Don Rice, interim provost and vice chancellor, said the university could improve its retention rate by changing the way faculty teach basic, required math and science courses. Students become discouraged by the difficulty of the classes or low grades, he said.

Rice said he thought the courses were taught to prepare students for science and engineering majors, rather than to help them understand the way science in the world works, how it affects world policy and its shaping of environmental and biological processes.

“I’m a bit speaking out of turn because I don’t teach science and I don’t teach math, but in my conversations with the deans we’re trying to grapple with that problem,” Rice said.

He added that students should be encouraged to take required math classes as freshmen. Though they might think they will be better prepared as juniors or seniors, students forget skills learned in high school if they wait longer, Rice said.

Rice said he also hopes to work with other administrators to develop First Year Experience, a program designed to orient freshmen to university life while allowing them to get to know each other.

In 2006, the National Resource Center for First-Year Experience and Students in Transition surveyed 2,646 institutions of higher learning, according to the center’s Web site. Of the 968 institutions that responded, 821 said they offered some type of First-Year Experience seminar. More than half of the respondents said their programs helped students develop academic skills and learn more about campus resources.

“If we start doing those things right, it’s not going to be immediate turnaround,” Rice said. “(But) I think if the Board of Trustees will give us three or four years, I think we will show an upturn in the number of people we educate and the kind of education they’re getting.”

Poshard said the university needed to market more heavily to transfer students and would do so through the addition of nine outreach centers on community college campuses in the region.

Valle said administrators would discuss offering in-state tuition to some students from bordering counties in neighboring states. Institutions such as Murray State University and Southeast Missouri State University have lured students from southern Illinois by offering in-state tuition rates, Valle said.

The Faculty Senate discussed the possibility at its Feb. 19 meeting, and Peggy Stockdale, the organization’s president, said the university would need to gain 400 out-of-state students to make the measure profitable.

Despite the problem’s complexity, administrators say they believe the university can pull itself out of the slump. But there are no easy answers.

“It’s just a lot of stuff. It’s not a simple black-and-white issue,” Poshard said. “We’re just trying to get our arms around it.”

Allison Petty can be reached

536-3311 ext. 259 or

[email protected].