Managing Growth
When Steven H. Tallant became president of Texas A&M University at Kingsville in 2008, enrollment on the main campus stood at about 5,700, down more than 2,000 from its peak in the 1970s.
After the rollout of an effort to increase enrollment, Mr. Tallant watched the student population soar to nearly 9,000. That jump ranks it as the fastest-growing public doctoral institution in the country from 2003 to 2013.
Meanwhile, overall college enrollment in the United States has shrunk for four consecutive years. So how have some colleges managed to grow so rapidly, even as the number of high-school graduates stagnates and fewer nontraditional students take the plunge?
“There is not a silver bullet to growth. There are a lot of variables,” says Mr. Tallant.
The university’s plan centered on the idea that your best recruiters are your current students. From there university officials created new student programs and focused on improving the campus’s appearance, dormitories, and retention rates.
Finding space for everyone was not that challenging because the campus had excess classrooms left over from periods of higher enrollment. Some of the buildings, however, were not in the best shape.
“The campus looked old and tired. We cleaned it up and made it look better,” said Mr. Tallant. “You have the first 15 minutes of a visit to leave an impression. If not, they aren’t going to come.”
The institution also raised its admission standards, putting an end to open admissions — a move that left some confused.
“People thought that I was nuts to up standards when we were trying to find new students,” he said. “But students want to belong to good universities: It makes them proud of their school.”
Mr. Tallant says the rural campus, 40 miles southwest of Corpus Christi, has increased its reach to places like Austin and San Antonio. Local students who fall below the new standards, he notes, can attend nearby community colleges.
The rapid growth poses some issues, especially when it comes to finding and training faculty. In the last five years, Kingsville added 66 adjunct faculty members and lecturers to keep up with the number of students, he said.
Because of cost and initial uncertainty about whether growth would be sustained, the university “couldn’t invest in tenure-track faculty right away. But every so many students added, dollars would go toward faculty,” Mr. Tallant said. During the past 18 months, he has approved the hiring of 35 new tenure-track professors.
Many of these endeavors have cost a chunk of change, but the expenses have been offset by alumni giving, Mr. Tallant says. The campus has also received support from Austin, including a $60-million allocation this year from the Legislature to expand its music building and add a general classroom building. — Lance Lambert
A Yardstick for Racial Diversity
Many colleges assert that their campuses are among the most diverse in the country, but they don’t explain by what measure.
In 1991, Philip Meyer, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina, and Shawn McIntosh, of the newspaper USA Today, created a Diversity Index based on probability theory. The Chronicle used that formula to identify the most-diverse campuses in the country.
The index is a number, on a scale from 0 to 100, that represents the chance that two people chosen randomly will be of different races or ethnicities. The higher the number, the greater the diversity.
When comparing people who report being of two or more races, the index considers them diverse by default. So it is not surprising that many of the campuses that ranked among the most diverse in the fall of 2013 were in Hawaii, where close to a quarter of the residents identify themselves as being of two or more races.
Among four-year public institutions, the University of Hawaii at Hilo was the most diverse, with a diversity index of 87.31 in the fall of 2013, followed by three other University of Hawaii campuses.
Hawaii Pacific University was the most diverse four-year private nonprofit institution, with a diversity index of 84.26.
Ronald E. Cambra, assistant vice chancellor for undergraduate education at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, attributed his campus’s high index to the overall diversity in the state as well as the university’s recruiting efforts. He says the university’s focus on peer mentoring and group work fosters a sense of community among students of all backgrounds. — Sandhya Kambhampati
In Search of Socioeconomic Diversity
One indicator of whether a college serves a high share of students from low-income families is its percentage of Pell Grant recipients. Only financially needy students are eligible to receive that federal aid.
Laura W. Perna, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, notes that family income “is positively correlated with traditional measures of academic achievement. And so at the less academically selective schools, you have students who, on average, have lower incomes,” she said. “For academically selective institutions, it takes real institutional commitment to not just enroll the higher-income students.”
At Bacone College, a private nonprofit institution in Oklahoma, nearly 95 percent of students received Pell Grants in 2012-13. Kindle Holderby, Bacone’s director of enrollment management and student life, says the high figure reflects the institution’s mission.
“Bacone was founded with the purpose of educating Native Americans, and many Native Americans in the late 1800s were poor. They could come here and get a college degree very cheaply; we still have this commitment to lower-income students today,” Mr. Holderby said.
Marta Soto, a financial-aid officer for the University of Puerto Rico at Aguadilla, says students from needy families are drawn there to earn credits at the commuter campus at a lower cost before transferring to another campus in the system. In 2012-13, 81 percent of Aguadilla’s students received Pell Grants.
A few colleges that enroll a low percentage of Pell Grant recipients also cited their mission as the reason. At Thomas Edison State College, a public four-year institution in New Jersey, only 12 percent of undergraduates received Pell Grants in 2012-13. The institution focuses on educating older adults, says Joe Guzzardo, a college spokesman.
“When you factor in our students’ age, their dependents, and their incomes, the fact is that they don’t typically meet the criteria for Pell Grants,” he said. “A fairly large percentage of our students are active-duty military, and they use military tuition assistance instead.” — Isaac Stein
Correction (August 20, 2015, 2:50 p.m.): A table on the fastest-growing institutions originally listed Ivy Tech Community College-Central Indiana as the fastest-growing public associate institution. That is incorrect. The college appeared to have grown by more than 1,000 percent from 2003 to 2013 because it reported the enrollment of its 14 regions collectively in 2013 but separately in 2003. Its growth during the 10-year period was only 78 percent. The table has been revised to show River Parishes Community College as the fastest-growing public associate institution.
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