The University of Florida is big. In fact, the president felt it was too big. At 35,000 undergraduates, the university was done growing; it might even shrink.
But that was two years ago, and not much other than sunshine stays the same in Florida. Now, the university is planning to grow again, but in an unusual way—enrolling 2,000 students in a spring and summer cohort. They will be full-fledged undergraduates, but they will be allowed to live and take classes on the campus only during those semesters for the entire time they’re at the university.
Those students could still participate in on-campus activities in the fall—yes, they’d be eligible for football tickets—and would be able to enroll in online courses if they wanted to move more quickly through their coursework. Others might opt to study abroad, work, or do internships away from campus in the fall.
It’s the first time a major university, and perhaps any, has made such a move. “It’s an experiment, but we think it’s a good experiment,” says Joseph Glover, the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “We’re offering increased access.”
State universities in fast-growing regions have been struggling with public demand that doesn’t often align with public support. In Florida, the budget passed earlier this month reduced appropriations for the University of Florida by about $54-million, after years of deep cuts. Just months before, the university had received 29,000 applications for 6,400 slots in next year’s freshman class—and Floridians haven’t been quiet about their frustration with the increasingly long odds of admission.
“We consistently hear from students who don’t get in in the fall, ‘I’ll come any semester you’ll have me,’” says Zina L. Evans, vice president for enrollment management and associate provost.
The university has already increased the number of freshmen it admits in the spring to 400, from about 100 less than five years ago, she says. It also brings in about 1,000 transfer students in the spring. As at most campuses, those students are allowed to take classes any semester in subsequent years. But that experience helped convince Ms. Evans that students would be interested in the new option.
Florida started discussing the idea two years ago, Mr. Glover says. Around that time, leaders felt they needed to reduce undergraduate enrollment (it’s now 32,600) to better align it with resources, but they were reluctant to limit access to the flagship further. As Mr. Glover looked at the numbers, he realized they had room for about 2,000 more students in the spring and that they might be able to add courses in the summer. The move would increase access and might bring in net revenue, too.
“These days, we do all kinds of innovative things,” he says. “I simply thought, Is there a market?”
‘Not a Second-Class Option’
The university will soon know for certain. This month, lawmakers changed the rules for the state’s popular Bright Futures scholarship to allow students to use it in the summer, but only if they opt for Florida’s spring-summer schedule. The change was crucial to the university’s plans; about 95 percent of its in-state students receive the scholarship, and it would have been costly—perhaps prohibitively so—for the university to make up the difference in grant aid. (The elimination of the year-round federal Pell Grant isn’t an impediment because students can use the grant in the summer as long as they have aid money left.)
With the green light, the university plans to enroll the first spring-summer students in January 2013, which means the admissions office has to start promoting the option by August or September. In the meantime, university officials have to settle some big questions: What will the mix of freshman and transfer students be? What majors will they offer on the alternative schedule? And what distinctive opportunities can the university give the students?
“We want to make absolutely clear that this is not a second-class option at the University of Florida,” Mr. Glover says. “Explaining it, we think, is going to be a challenge.”
Ms. Evans says that applicants will be able to apply for both regular fall admission and the spring-summer option. Students will only be offered spring-summer admission if they have expressed interest in it. While university officials plan to eventually serve 2,000 students with the new schedule, they hope to enroll between 500 and 1,000 in the first year, depending on the mix of freshmen and transfer students.
The university also has to settle on the mix of majors for the new group. Although Florida already has about 25,000 graduate and undergraduate students on campus in the summer, it will have to ramp up course offerings for the new group to be able to graduate on time—and Mr. Glover says it doesn’t make financial sense to increase offerings in every field. Some smaller departments would also struggle to have enough professors available for all three semesters.
Though nothing is set, Mr. Glover says, some potential fields are those that already offer a substantial number of courses in the summer. Biology, chemistry, English, and math fall into that category.
Mr. Glover also has to figure out how the university will deal with faculty contracts, which are set for nine months, in any affected departments.
He’s in regular contact with Ms. Evans, along with the deans of the various colleges as they hash out the not-so-fine print. “It’s going to evolve quite rapidly,” he says. That alone is enough to make the plan unusual in higher education.
And if it proves too odd? The university, Mr. Glover says, will try a new experiment to get resources and demand better in line.
