FAYETTEVILLE — As the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville closes in on an enrollment milestone, the leader of the state’s 141-yearold land-grant institution is now talking about an even larger student body.
UA Chancellor G. David Gearhart, who said last year that school officials wanted to “get to 25,000 students as quickly as possible” and then “take a breath and look at our facilities,” said school officials have set a new goal.
“We want to go to 28,000,” Gearhart said last week. “We’ve said that as a community. We think we can. I think we’ll be there relatively soon, and we’ve got to plan for it.”
Suzanne McCray, UA’s vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions, projects an enrollment of about 24,700 for the fall semester, which begins Aug. 20. That includes a freshman class of about 4,600.
Both figures would be records for the state’s oldest and largest public university. Last year, UA posted an official fall enrollment of 23,199 students. That total included a freshman class of 4,447.
McCray said UA is one classroom building away from being able to “accommodate and educate” 28,000 students.
If UA continues to draw in freshman classes of about 4,600 students and its retention rate continues to improve, it stands to reason that the enrollment will reach 28,000 within the next three years, McCray said.
Increasing enrollment and retention is important to the state. About 19.5 percent of the state’s residents have a college degree. Arkansas is 49th, tied with Mississippi, among states with people who are at least 25 years old with at least a bachelor’s degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey in 2010, the latest available numbers.
Officials say a more-educated state could increase the opportunities to recruit new business and industry, providing Arkansans with more higher-paying jobs.
UA has planned for its growth.
This fall, the university will open its $14.6 million Hillside Auditorium, which has one classroom with about 490 seats and another with 285.
Additional classrooms are also part of the $27.1 million renovation and addition of Ozark Hall and the $36.6 million expansion and renovation of Vol Walker Hall.
Both projects on the historic buildings began last year and are projected for completion in August 2013.
On July 20, UA began soliciting responses from qualified architects and general contractors to design and construct a general-use classroom and teaching lab building.
Construction would start in July 2013 with a timeline of 25 to 28 months, meaning it could open for the fall 2015 semester.
“The combination of the larger class with lots of construction has been the thing to make it feel like it’s been overwhelming,” McCray said, adding that once Hillside, Ozark and Vol Walker all are open the “campus will have real breathing room.”
“The chancellor is very attached to keeping the [average] student-to-teacher ratio at 18 to 1 if not less,” she said.
Sharon Gaber, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, said UA added 13 tenure-track positions for the 2012-13 school year. The university also hired additional non-tenure-track faculty and graduate assistants who teach and assist faculty, Gaber said.
RETENTION IMPROVING
The expected increase of about 1,500 students over last year is attributable not only to incoming freshmen or transfers but also to those who are returning for another year, McCray said.
UA’s freshman retention rate, which reflects how many first-year students return for their second year, has risen incrementally in the past five years.
It was 83.5 percent last fall, slightly better than 82.7 percent in 2010. It should rise again this year, McCray said.
“We’re very pleased because these are very capable students and the retention level has been high,” she said.
As of last week, the number of all of the university’s continuing students - those who are returning as sophomores, juniors or seniors - is about 800 more than on the same date in July 2011, she said.
UA’s enrollment surge coincided with the expansion of state-supported scholarships fueled by proceeds from the state lottery.
The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery began on Sept. 28, 2009. The state Department of Higher Education began awarding $5,000 annual scholarships to full-time students at four-year schools and $2,500 for those at two year colleges for the fall 2010 semester.
In 2011, legislators voted to cut scholarship amounts for new recipients to $4,500 and $2,250, respectively, citing a shortfall projected to occur within a few years as a result of more students getting scholarships than anticipated and lower projections for lottery proceeds.
The scholarships are helping to fuel skyrocketing enrollment at UA, which grew by 3,000 students between 2009 and 2011. The campus hadn’t added that many students in the previous four years combined.
The state’s other state-supported universities haven’t seen similar increases.
Arkansas State University-Jonesboro grew by 3.8 percent in fall 2011 to 13,290 students, making it the second-largest university in the state.
Rick Stripling, ASU’s vice chancellor for student affairs, said through a spokesman that it’s too early to tell what the enrollment picture will look like in the fall semester. But he did say it is “following a pattern similar to last year,” with one percent falling either way.
At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the third largest school in the state, enrollment went down last fall by 0.4 percent, to 13,119.
As of July 24 - 30 days from the first day of classes - UALR’s projected enrollment numbers show it is up 54 students, a 0.6 percent increase.
Overall, enrollment at all of the state’s colleges and universities increased by 2.1 percent in 2011.
Last fall, Gearhart and other UA-Fayetteville administrators began touting the school as the “university of first-choice” for Arkansas’ high school students.
“When students have enough money to go to the schools that they want to go to, they do,” McCray said. “The lottery has been wonderful. It’s had an impact. In the last two years we have grown 33 percent in Arkansas students. That’s staggering.”
University enrollment is either flat or up in most states - but generally not down. Officials say it’s because, in part, universities tend to see more increases during poor economic times and because universities have become better at marketing themselves to prospective students. There are also more scholarship opportunities, they say.
At the University of Texas, preliminary estimates suggest total enrollment will be about 51,500 students on the Austin campus, said Tara A. Doolittle, the university’s director of media outreach. In Fall 2011, enrollment was 51,112.
The University of Missouri anticipates its enrollment will range from about 34,600 to 34,800 students on the Columbia, Mo., campus when the fall semester begins, said Ann J. Korschgen, the university’s vice provost for enrollment management. In fall 2011, 33,805 students - 25,502 in-state alone - enrolled.
DIVERSITY INCREASING
As UA’s enrollment escalates, McCray and Charles Robinson, vice provost for diversity affairs, are keeping an eye on the number of students from minority groups, which reached an all-time high last year at 3,820, according to the university’s office of institutional research.
That figure, which doesn’t include foreign students, represented a 15 percent spike from the previous year. Minority-group students represented 17.9 percent of the freshman class.
UA currently defines minority groups as blacks, Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, Hawaiians and students who list themselves as two or more races.
“We are seeing significant increases in the number of ‘underrepresented’ students who are applying and the number of underrepresented students who have been accepted,” Robinson said. “You can see that we’re growing our freshman enrollment in our underrepresented students.”
UA’s enrollment of students from minority groups - excluding foreign students - increased nearly 80 percent from the fall of 2005 to the fall of 2011, from 2,123 students to 3,820, according to the institutional research office.
Last fall, minority-group students comprised 16.5 percent of UA’s student body, exceeding the university’s goal for minority-group enrollment by 2015.
The university’s 2021 goal for minority-group enrollment is 20 percent.
“I’m hopeful that if we can continue our due diligence, we can far exceed the timing on the 2021 goal,” Robinson said.
UA for years has promoted itself as the first major Southern institution to enroll a black student without litigation, when Silas Hunt entered the School of Law in 1948. But historically UA’s black enrollment has lagged behind the state’s black population.
Robinson has said that the university historically has had a negative reputation as being unfriendly to black students. He is a professor of history at UA who co-authored with former UA administrator Lonnie Williams the book Remembrances in Black: Personal Perspectives of the African American Experience at the University of Arkansas, published in 2010 by the UAPress.
Black students make up the largest percentage of minority-group students at UA, but they represented 5.4 percent of the total student body in 2011. Blacks account for about 15 percent of the state’s 2.9 million residents, according to the 2010 U.S. Census.
Robinson, who is black, said his goal isn’t just to increase the number of black students at UA.
“This is about changing people’s perspectives about the University of Arkansas,” he said.
One way his office is trying to shake those perceptions is taking high school juniors and seniors to Fayetteville for a week each summer.
The ACT Academy, offered through the diversity office’s College Access Initiative, drew 400 applications for 75 slots this summer, so it was expanded to two sessions that served a total of 205 students from 50 high schools around the state, with most coming from the Arkansas Delta.
Schools represented ranged from West Memphis in northeast Arkansas to De Queen in southwest Arkansas to Dumas in southeast Arkansas, said Leslie Yingling, co-director of the College Access Initiative.
Students from six schools in Little Rock participated, as did those from Pine Bluff, Rogers and Fayetteville, Yingling said.
Eighty-six percent of the students were from minority groups, Yingling said.
The goals were to expose the youths to campus life and help them improve their scores on the ACT college entrance exam.
They stayed in dormitories and ate meals on campus while undergoing instruction and training for the test and also learning about college admissions.
Students paid either $40 or $75 depending on their family incomes, and UA picked up the remaining 90 percent of the program cost. The ones who completed the program will be registered for the September ACT exam.
It’s the third year UA has hosted the academy.
“We’re doing a lot of outreach,” McCray said. “We just hired another southern Arkansas recruiter. We want to make sure that we bring a class that is diverse.” Information for this article was contributed by Chad Day of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 07/30/2012