West Virginia University, a year after going through detailed and challenging belt-tightening measures, is experiencing a drop in student enrollment but officials believe the situation can be handled without emergency actions.
WVU officials Patrice Harris and Mark Gavin, speaking on MetroNews’ “Talkline” this week described efforts to improve retention and address enrollment challenges, including promising new programs in robotics, cybersecurity and data analytics.
“Of course, we want to increase enrollment every year, right?” Harris, the vice chair of the university’s board of governors, said on “Talkline.” “That’s our big, hairy audacious goal among many others at the university.”
University officials have described ways to remain appealing to students and their families after last year’s difficult restructuring — and after a recent acknowledgement that incoming freshman numbers are lower than anticipated.
Some of the factors in that enrollment dip included broad challenges with student aid dollars available through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly called FAFSA, as well as questions about recruitment strategy, admission standards and tuition pricing points.
“The safe thing would be to say that we recognize that we had a drop in first-time freshmen relative to our projected budget. We are actively developing strategies to counter that, as we know there will be some demographic challenges coming up and others, said Gavin, as he addressed WVU’s Faculty Senate earlier this week.
University officials emphasized that the enrollment challenges will receive more attention during a January meeting.
This week’s enrollment update revealed that WVU’s first-time freshman enrollment is 4,129 on the Morgantown campus. “I will note that that is about 200 short of what we had projected in our budget,” Gavin said.
First-time freshman enrollment is 316 at Potomac State College (74 short of projections) and 279 at WVU Tech in Beckley (33 short of projections).
The total of 4,724 freshmen enrolled for the first time is 307 short of the university system’s projected budget.
“Now the good news is, when you look at total enrollment, we closed some of that gap by having better than projected retention numbers,” Gavin said.
Notably, the university just hit a historic freshmen retention rate of 83.4% this fall, reflecting an increase of 2% over last year, while the university’s four-year graduation rate has improved by 1.3%, from 50.8% to 52.1 percent, said April Kaull, the university’s executive director of communications in a followup explanation about the enrollment figures. “Our six-year graduation rate has also improved by 2.7%, from 61.1% to 63.8%, over the last two years.”
Total enrollment across all campuses this year is 24,788.
WVU had anticipated 24,990 students this year. The difference means the university is down 202 students from what it had expected, about .8 percent.
The lower-than-expected student enrollment is financially manageable for the fiscal year, Gavin said.
“That leaves us just at 202 short of what we had projected for budget,” Gavin said. “The good news is, that is a close enough number that budgetarily we can address that through normal processes. So it doesn’t foreshadow any measures to address that shortfall because it is small enough we can accommodate it through 2025.”
A $2 million reserve was released to support faculty activities, prioritizing travel and research materials.
“That $2 million encompasses a lot of things, but what we focused on in terms of prioritizing is spending that would directly benefit faculty,” Gavin said.
He received some questions from faculty who attended the meeting.
Accounting professor Scott Fleming asked about how the lower-than-expected number of freshmen students might be extrapolated over time. In other words, is this a trend resulting in an even bigger student population gap over a period of years?
“Do we know or do you have the numbers broken down by what those are driven by? Is that in-state? Is that out-of-state?” Fleming asked.
The initial response was that WVU is looking into that breakdown, but the numbers aren’t ready yet.
Fleming continued by commenting, “there’s a lot of other schools that are being proactive by extending in-state tuition to surrounding counties and, therefore, they are not seeing a decline perhaps as much as what we’re going to — very proactive, not reactive. And number two, I’d like to understand that 200 individual first-time freshman gap. We’re not approaching the cliff yet, and I just want to see if we’ve priced ourselves out of the market for out-of-state.”
Gavin suggested the university is developing more active strategies for student recruitment across the system.
Christopher Lituma, an associate professor of wildlife and fisheries resources described a role he has taken on to help recruit students. He said parents have expressed concern about last year’s academic transformation and whether the current lineup of academic programs will remain stable.
He asked if WVU officials could provide greater assurance for parents: “You know, is there a way in which you can say that ‘WVU is not going under.’ Or, ‘Choose a different program.’ Or ‘Stay in the college.'”
Lituma continued, “I have had parents ask me. They know. There are parents out there looking and using that as a determining factor to come to WVU, right? So it seems like if we’re worried about enrollment, that might be a message that could be received pretty well at least in terms of parents who are visiting and thinking ‘OK, are these university people burying their head in the sand’ and they’re acknowledging up front that this still may be an ongoing issue.”
Gavin responded that the university still has more than 300 programs. “We have an incredibly diverse array of programs, and that’s not going to change.”