They left before 5:30 a.m.
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff band members, the dance squad, students, professors and staff members piled on a charter bus last month, ready to hit the road. UAPB Chancellor Laurence Alexander had gotten to the meeting site early, but the group had already left, leaving him to fend for himself.
The destination: Blytheville and Osceola in the Arkansas Delta.
The university rolled out the buses, for tours throughout the state, for the first time in fall 2014 after five straight years of declining enrollment. The slip was so quick and happened over such a short period of time that it forced the university to continuously make budget cuts. In total, the historically black public university lost about one-third of its students.
"It was a rough, rough period," said Alexander, who started as chancellor in July 2013. "It had a detrimental effect on the campus. It's truly compounded when you have a drop like that so quickly over a short period of time. It's hard to catch one's breath."
UAPB transformed the buses that transport athletes and other students to extracurricular events, applying its new marketing brand to create a rolling billboard: the logo with the bell tower, the name and the head of a Golden Lion, the university's mascot. The next obvious step was to take it on the road, and what better way, Alexander said, than to address the most serious threat to the university at the time -- its enrollment.
"The whole idea behind this bus tour and recruitment was really to reintroduce the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff to Arkansans," he said. "I think people knew it was here all that time. But I think things had gotten a little quiet on our end. There had been quite a bit of advertising out there by other institutions and, I think, we had kind of lost our place among them. It had slipped, and so we had needed to go out and reintroduce ourselves and re-position ourselves with the people of Arkansas."
The next fall, the university earned a reprieve, turning around its enrollment slump with an increase of about 5.8 percent, to 2,658 students. And in fall 2016, the university saw a 6.1 percent increase, to 2,821 students.
In addition to the bus tours, Alexander led UAPB through internal structural changes, including the creation of the Office of Enrollment Management, which brought recruitment, retention, admissions and student success programs under one roof. And he got the entire campus community involved in recruiting.
"The recruitment office will recruit students," said Linda Okiror, UAPB's associate vice chancellor for enrollment management and student success. "But it's the faculty and students that can really recruit for a major."
The university created an advisory group made up of faculty members in assorted academic departments, who call and email applicants.
They also tag along on the bus tours.
In Blytheville, the band and dance squad revved up the room as high school students started streaming into the gymnasium at the host school, Arkansas Northeastern College. College and university faculty in booths on the outer edges of the room danced, waved pompoms and clapped along to the music.
Then came presentations from Arkansas Northeastern President Jim Shemwell, Alexander, UAPB Director of Recruitment Chris Robinson and students from both schools. All of the presentations relayed a recurring theme: opportunity.
"How many of you are looking for an opportunity at a four-year college?" Alexander asked.
Hands shot into the air.
"If you are looking for an opportunity at a four-year college, at UAPB, you cannot go wrong," he continued. "You can start at UAPB and go anywhere. You can start at UAPB, and go where?"
"Anywhere," the crowd of about 50 students from area high schools said.
UAPB wasn't in Blytheville to recruit students just to increase enrollment, Alexander said.
"We're about getting you as an individual, learning your name, understanding where you want to go and providing access and opportunity for you to get there," he said. "So we are interested and vested in your success as a student at our university because I want to be here to recruit you, and I want to be there on the stage to shake your hand and hand you your diploma when you graduate. That is what it's all about at our university."
Afterward, the high school students floated around the booths, talking to faculty members from each department.
Corina Martin, 18, a senior at Gosnell High School, peered in between two other students to get a peek at the brochures for UAPB's School of Agriculture, Fisheries and Human Sciences.
Martin wants to study nursing but has been shopping around for the right school in Arkansas and her home state of Rhode Island, she said.
"I'll take any opportunity and see where I can go and if it will help me," she said. "And I like what I'm hearing so far."
Malik Walker, 20, a UAPB junior studying broadcast journalism, said he wanted to return to his hometown and motivate students.
"I always want to come back and encourage the young men, especially, to get away," he said in Blytheville. "Do something. You know what I'm saying? If you want to come back, come back then. But bring something with you. Because there's nothing here."
Walker admits that UAPB wasn't his first choice, but he said he has enjoyed his time in Pine Bluff.
"In a nutshell, it's almost just like being here" in Blytheville, said Walker, who is black. "It's a lot of black people, a lot of poverty, but the university is kind of like the hope there" in Pine Bluff.
UAPB still hasn't caught up to the 3,792 students it had in 2009 before the enrollment drop, but a continuous 6 percent increase will get the university back to a stabilized enrollment, Alexander said. Still, it hasn't stopped him from setting lofty goals: first 4,000, then 5,000, even 15,000 students.
"We are undersized," he said. "We haven't right-sized ourselves yet. I think it matters in the whole scheme of things because a full student body contributes significantly to the life of the university. It gives you a full range of options, a full range of majors, a full range of student events and activities."
Senior Ashleigh Tate, 22, of Pine Bluff said that when she first started in 2013 through the campus' Learning Institute and Opportunities for New Students, or LIONS, program -- which was initially for students who needed remedial coursework -- the program had only a handful of students. Now, the summer program has grown to more than 200 students and is open to incoming freshmen who want a head start on their college coursework.
The campus last fall acquired two food options that students had been clamoring for: a Chick-fil-A and a Starbucks, she said.
Tate, the 2016-17 Miss UAPB and who is studying English, said more students are getting involved in organizations and on-campus activities, too. During homecoming week, the university's Student Government Association threw a comedy show that filled the fine arts auditorium to the brim and forced officials to turn students away.
With the campus filling out again, UAPB officials are looking to implement the university's latest campus master plan. The end result, they said, will be a pedestrian-friendly, strategically mapped out campus.
"I think it's wise if you're going to get things accomplished to tie together the elements of student growth, enrollment growth, financing and planning altogether at the same time, so that you're not found lacking at the end of the day," Alexander said.
"So when you get larger numbers of students -- 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 students -- they will already have some restaurants and shops and eateries and stores and an amphitheater and places where they can go and where they can enjoy it and you're not put in a position of clamoring for those things at that time."
UAPB is working on completing a new part of the Delta residence hall, which will house an additional 140 students, and on renovating the old Delta complex, which is about 16 years old, said Robert Wall, the university's director of facilities management.
The university has also made a priority of having a new student center -- which would replace the L.A. Davis Student Union and include a fitness center -- and one of Alexander's pet projects: a nanoscience and biotechnology research center. One area in which the university is lacking is having on-campus spaces for research, especially in biotechnology, Alexander said.
The list stretches on from letters "A" through "U," and the university is looking for ways to fund all of the projects.
"So we're actually, in an organized way, reaching out to really various sources because if you added up all of these projects, it would come to a huge price tag -- over $100 million," he said.
"You know, if I could get all of this this year, we could have lots of action going on right here. But I think it's going to take a little while to work through some of these on the revenue and on the financing for it."
Metro on 03/06/2017