Despite dips in undergraduate enrollments during recent years, the UH student body is expected to increase through new efforts to recruit and retain students.
"What we are most concerned with is recruiting the right students and retaining students," Assistant Vice President of Undergraduate Studies Agnes Defranco said.
Despite some increases since 2002, undergraduate enrollment reached its peak in 2004 at 26,366 and dipped slightly afterward through 2006. Overall, enrollment has been relatively flat, although UH officials have said that student recruitment and retention are main priorities.
Vice President of Academic Affairs Donald Foss said the recruiting process involved increasing the applicant pool and number of enrolled students while retaining student diversity.
"We’d like to increase the number of enrolled (students) but don’t want to sacrifice quality," Foss said.
The University has been making efforts to reach out statewide to prospective students through high schools and community colleges and has also been sending out information by mail, Defranco said. UH representatives are sent out to nearly 580 junior colleges and more than 1,000 high schools statewide, and the University has also been trying to improve transfer enrollment through joint admissions agreements with community colleges, increase campus tours and offer transfer scholarships.
"We are looking for students to attend a university," Defranco said.
The amount of high school graduates in Harris County, which have been low in recent years, has also affected enrollment, according to Children at Risk, a local non-profit organization advocating children to attend school and improve the quality of education.
In Harris County alone, one-third of high school students dropout before graduation, according to Children at Risk.
Houston has also been ranked as one of the top 10 cities with the most high school drop out rates, according to a 2004 Johns Hopkins study.
Along with high drop out rates, tuition and fee increases have also been a main factor of low enrollment, Defranco said.
One-fourth of enrolled freshmen do not return for their sophomore year, according to data from the UH Office of Institutional Research.
Along with increases, the economy has also been another factor. Despite the lowering trends, the University has made attempts to retain students through new programs.
Beginning in summer 2006, incoming freshmen have been offered the Graduation Pledge, an agreement that gives students funds to pay for rising education costs if a student completes 30 hours a year in good academic standing.
The Jump is another program offered to incoming freshmen, allowing them to attend two classes during Summer IV to give students a head start on required courses and to get acquainted with campus.
Defranco also said that UH is trying to change its image as an inviting university to attract students.
The master plan has campus renovation projects that include a commercialized area and a loft complex for graduate students among other improvements to create a college town atmosphere, she said.
Calculating enrollment figures are a challenge because the numbers constantly change and are officially tallied after the beginning of the school year, Executive Director of Organizational Management Sandra Frieden said. Enrollment numbers change daily and have risen recently, she said.
New official enrollment figures to be released later than expected
by Kelsie Hahn
Although the official reporting day for enrollment was Tuesday, official figures weren’t available because the University is continuing to adjust to PeopleSoft 8.9 and the new, first-payment deadline, UH officials said.
The University will not release any reports until after the 20th class day, Vice President of Academic Affairs Donald Foss said in an email.
"This year the first payment deadline was before classes started – that changes what we do and when they do it," Libby Barlow, executive director of Research and Institutional Effectiveness and interim Registrar, said. "So we won’t be able to guess about fall enrollment until we have seen enough years of it to see a pattern,"
Enrollment predictions are more tentative this year than in the past, but preliminary numbers indicate that semester credit hours being taken may have increased from previous semesters, Foss said.
"The tentative numbers we have suggest that, overall, enrollment – as defined by the number of students registered- is just about the same this year as last year. It may be a fraction of a percent lower, but we are not yet sure," he said.
The 20th class day is the last chance for students who have been dropped for non-payment to be re-enrolled in the University, so official numbers have never been compiled prior to that day, Barlow said.
"Reporting rules state that students must be enrolled on the 12th class day and paid by the 20th class day in order to count them," she said.
"We have been willing to make guesses in past years, and we are less willing to do that now not so much because of PeopleSoft, but because the payment deadline is different this year," Barlow said.
Data from previous years, with the old payment deadlines, allowed the University to estimate percentages of students who would and would not be reinstated by the 20th class day, she said.
Any delays caused by PeopleSoft have been in the distribution, and not the compilation, of enrollment numbers, she said.
"For example, we have been slow developing the capacity for college users to count students within colleges and majors," she said. "We have been able to do it all along – just hadn’t yet written the program for colleges to run.
"We can’t do everything at once, and counting students within colleges or majors became available to colleges only last Friday."
Data will be run for final enrollment numbers once all the transactions of the 20th class day are processed, and Barlow expects the process to work as well, if not faster, than on the old system.
"We have been able to eliminate some steps in PeopleSoft," she said. "However, it will never be as quick as anyone thinks it should be because we have to do a lot of error checking to make sure it is all right before we submit it. We have to be thorough, so it takes time."
Despite a constant decrease, administrators stay positive about graduate enrollment
by Ashley Hess
Graduate and post-baccalaureate enrollment at the University of Houston has declined between 2002 and 2006 because of various factors, which drew attention and triggered some concern from faculty and administration.
While some of the programs are being affected by the decline, others are stocking up with new marketing and recruiting strategies, to generate more interest and applications for fall semester.
"At the graduate level, recruiting strategies are always specific to each college, department or program as opposed to a centralized type of recruiting like you have on the undergraduate side," Assistant Dean of Graduate and Professional Studies Margaret Watson said.
"It’s a decentralized process, and it’s hard to tell how each individual program is going to do its recruiting."
Out of the 6,210 graduate and post-baccalaureate students enrolled at UH in the fall semester 2006, more than half were students in the Bauer College of Business, the College of Education or the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
One-fifth of the total graduate enrollment came from Bauer, according to the Office of Institutional Research.
Because Bauer makes up a large portion of graduate and post-baccalaureate enrollment, it is a good indicator of overall trends, Associate Dean of Bauer’s Gradua
te and Professional Studies Latha Ramchand said.
With their new recruiting strategies, the school is already seeing an increase in admissions for Fall 2007.
Since last year, the MBA enrollment numbers are up by 16 percent, Ramchand said.
"We are doing a lot more in terms of marketing and are really listening to what our students want," Ramchand said. "I think that the effect of some of our new efforts will take awhile to be felt, but they are all going in the direction of getting the word out that Bauer and UH are places where you want to earn a graduate degree."
Stronger public relations have also been established with community involvement on a bigger scale, she said.
"We are also talking to more companies in the Houston area, doing information sessions more often and at easier times, and talking to undergrads about pursuing an MBA," Ramchand said.
Brian Sellen, who is a full-time MBA program student and started the program in August 2006, said that UH was the first university he considered after graduating from here as well.
"Of all the programs in the city, I thought that UH was the most affordable and offered the highest quality of education," Sellen said. "I was also excited about being a part of the first full-time MBA program BCB was offering."
In his search, Sellen looked into other Houston-area MBA programs offered from Rice University and University of Texas A’M, but said that UH was the most forthcoming and responsive during the application process with its monthly information sessions.
"There isn’t much recruiting when it came to graduate school," Sellen said.
Most schools are allowed to be selective because the program can only hold so many people.
"But for UH, there were information sessions I attended, and the staff in the graduate programs office was always there to answer questions."
Sellen said that he thinks that UH’s advertising helped others choose Bauer’s graduate program.
"I know they are placing ads in top business journals and doing radio spots; it must have paid off because the class size class has doubled from last year," he said. "Radio spots and ads can influence someone to investigate your program, but you have to be prepared to sell them on it when they come calling."
Falling enrollment numbers have been the trend at UH since 2002, but some of the main factors that have contributed are a fluctuating economy, local competition and increasing tuition.
Growth in graduate enrollment will remain stagnant if the faculty size does not increase with it, economics professor Steven Craig said.
Analyzing the economical reasons for enrollment decreases is difficult to gauge because of how each year has fluctuated, he said.
"A final issue that has arisen is that some people have talked about increasing our program offerings or the number of acceptances in fields that are growing," Craig said. "The problem with this is that it is more difficult to expand graduate programs than undergraduate because the number of tenure-track faculty is virtually the only tool that you can use.
"Thus, our inability over the last decade or so to grow our faculty has severely limited our capacity, especially in the growing fields."
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