Virginia Tech has a big problem that other colleges would love to be wrestling with: a supersized incoming freshman class about 1,000 students larger than anticipated. So the university is offering cash inducements for some students to defer enrollment, but it says that deferment is only one strategy in its arsenal and that by late August it will be ready for the Class of 2023, no matter its size.
“It’s a challenging but essentially good problem to have,” said Mark Owczarski, assistant vice president for university relations. And a fluky one when the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center just released figures showing that public-sector postsecondary enrollment declined 1.9 percent this past year, part of a longer-term slide.
Although it’s hard to pinpoint one cause for this surge amid gloomy national trends, Owczarski said all evidence points to the university’s planned Northern Virginia Innovation Campus in Alexandria as a major, if indirect, draw. The new campus, which won’t be open for five to 10 years, will be part of a rising tech locus and just two miles from the Amazon HQ2 in development. Owczarski thinks there’s a “halo effect” around the high-profile, high-tech center, and that students want to be part of the souped-up undergraduate pipeline for it. Although the Alexandria campus will focus on graduate studies, Blacksburg will make 100 to 120 new computer-science faculty hires in the next five years and expand by 2,000 students in that discipline over the next eight years. But the planned student expansion got ahead of itself.
A good problem is still a problem, and Virginia Tech knew it was facing one the last week of April. Usually student commitments fall off that week before the May 1 deadline, but this year, Owczarski said, they just kept coming right up to the end. More than 30,000 students applied to the university, a mark hit only once before, last year. This year, Virginia Tech was aiming for an incoming class of 7,000 that, with the so-called summer melt of students who make other plans or don’t follow through, would have yielded 6,600. But instead of that initial 7,000, it got 8,009.
So the university sent out on Tuesday night an offer to 1,559 in-state freshmen of cash inducements to defer enrollment. For a $1,000 yearly scholarship over the next four years, they can take a gap year. They can get reimbursed for a year of community-college courses before transferring. Or they can take free classes this summer and next, taking either fall or spring semester off, for a combined full year’s worth of credits. Virginia Tech has allotted $3.3 million over four years to pay for the inducements.
Students have until June 6 to apply for those options and will hear back by June 14. The students being offered those alternatives are majors in several engineering programs, biology, and two more general academic programs, university studies and exploring technologies. In addition, the university is waiving its requirement that freshmen live on campus, letting returning students get out of on-campus housing contracts, hiring additional faculty, and examining course schedules to accommodate the larger-than-expected class.
The University of Georgia offered a similar cash inducement two years ago. Virginia education authorities say Virginia Tech’s offer is apparently a first for the state.
Over-yields have happened before, said Owczarski, but this year’s reached “an unprecedented level.” The university has contracted with the consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz to help manage future enrollment, and construction will add 600 new beds within two years, Owczarski said.
As for this year’s crunch, Virginia Tech will see what kind of response to the cash inducements it gets by mid-June, he said, and take it from there. “We’re watching it day by day.”
Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.
