Enrollment gains linked to cost

Taking steps to make college more affordable has contributed to significant increases in enrollment at four of Rhode Island’s 11 colleges and universities, at a time when other schools are reporting stasis or declines.
Salve Regina University leads the pack with a 35 percent increase in the freshman class of 2018. The dramatic growth from 465 students in 2013 to 629 in 2014 was welcome following an incoming freshman class last year that was lower than the traditional number of 550, said James Fowler, vice president for enrollment management.
At the same time, Roger Williams University has continued to pilot its Affordable Excellence initiative, freezing tuition and guaranteeing the rate since 2012 for its undergraduates, said Brian E. Clark, director of public affairs. Last January, the university extended the initiative to law students by implementing an 18 percent tuition reduction, along with a guarantee.
Compared with last year, RWU’s freshman undergraduate class grew 4.3 percent to 1,149 from 1,102, while the number of incoming law students rose 24 percent to 138, from 111.
Tuition for incoming freshmen – not including fees or room and board – is $35,690 at Salve Regina, a private, Catholic university, and $29,976 at RWU.
Other schools that experienced increased enrollment include the University of Rhode Island, with a record 4.7 percent increase, and New England Institute of Technology, with a 2.5 percent increase.
While pursuing the usual means of increasing institutional investment in financial aid through fundraising and searching for additional sources of revenue, Fowler said, Salve Regina boosted its own financial aid grants and scholarships by between 3-5 percent, to $30 million in 2014-15.
“We went into the year knowing an investment in financial aid would engender a larger class and enrolling a larger class helps balance the budget,” he said. “Students are definitely needier. Families must be more cost sensitive in identifying higher education. At the same time, we know families are willing to invest if they see good value.”
But while affordability came into play at URI, promoting the school has been more important, said Dean Libutti, vice provost for enrollment management.
“We focus heavily on the work we’re doing in experiential education,” he said. “We’ve really made the recruitment of students a campuswide initiative and our faculty staff and entire URI community have really come together. It’s no longer the job of just the admissions office.”
NEIT’s tuition freeze, a longstanding tradition, has contributed to growth there, said Steven Kitchin, vice president for corporate education and training. Daniel P. Egan, president of the Association of Independent Colleges & Universities of Rhode Island, which includes eight colleges in the state, said more schools seem to be working hard to make tuition affordable.
“A fact often lost in the conversation about the rising ‘sticker price’ of a college education is that institutions are also making significant commitments to financial aid,” Egan observed. “With the decline in average family income seen over the last decade, institutions that can offer quality and affordability are seeing success.”
Other colleges’ enrollment figures show little to no growth – a circumstance some admissions and other school experts say they are consciously cultivating.
Providence College recorded no increase, while Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design reported negligible 1.1 percent and 1.5 percent increases, respectively. Rhode Island College and Johnson & Wales University both reported declines of 4.3 percent.
“Nationally, college enrollments are growing more slowly than they have in the past,” observed Egan. “This trend, combined with declining high school enrollments in the Northeast, is pushing colleges and universities to adapt their recruitment strategies.”
Bryant University reported a drop of 7.7 percent, but called it an aberration after a record year the year prior.
“In fall 2013, Bryant University’s freshman enrollment increased by 15.5 [percent] over the previous year,” said Elizabeth O’Neil, Bryant’s associate vice president for university relations. “In fall 2014, the freshman enrollment was reduced by 7.7 [percent] to return to historic norms consistent with our enrollment goals and strategic plan.”
According to Fowler, two other factors contributed to increased enrollment at Salve Regina: purifying the messaging about the school’s mission without necessarily increasing marketing; and spending the time to individually recruit students.
The result has been more of a national draw of out-of-state students for a school that has traditionally focused on the New England region, Fowler says.
Though primary markets have remained consistent in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, Salve Regina is seeing some increases in New York and New Jersey and more across the country.
“I think we’ve done a better job generating the right applications by using regression analysis of our historic data so we can better identify the places and types of students who do best here on our campus,” Fowler said. “In part, frankly, as the shift of students’ research has become almost entirely online in the initial prospect stage, there was a nice redesign of our website which does a better job of representing who we are as an institution.” The school also has a tagline that comes up in search engines that reads, “Learn. Live. Make a Difference.” More and more, messaging reflects the focused mission of those words as the school strives to educate the individual in the context of community, Fowler said.
At Roger Williams, 4.3 percent freshman-class growth is a healthy, measureable byproduct of the approach to making college more affordable with a tuition freeze, said Clark. RWU targets between 1,000 and 1,200 students in its freshman class, he said.
“We’re not trying to grow,” Clark said. “We can’t grow much past where we are right now. We don’t have the space on campus. But in order to hold our numbers and keep enrollment where it is, we need to appeal to a larger slice of a shrinking pie. The fact that we’re trending upward is an indicator that what we’re doing on the affordability side is working.”
That “shrinking pie” is the trend toward fewer high school students choosing college after graduation, Clark and others said – particularly in the Northeast. As reported in The New York Times in April, the percentage of high school students opting for college shrank from 70.1 percent in 2009 to 65.9 percent in 2013.
In 2012, RWU had a “very small incoming class of 999 – 21 students below the goal of 1,020,” Clark said. “It could have been the tip of the iceberg in terms of changing demographics, and if we did not act to address some of the problems students and parents are seeing in higher education, it could have been the start of a bad trend.”
At 1,033 students for two years in a row, Providence College leaders wanted 980 students, but got 53 more, said Hugh Lena, senior vice president and provost for academic affairs – an excess they planned for. The school can handle the number they wound up with, in terms of housing and financial aid, he said.
“Stability in enrollment is a real good thing,” Lena said. “It’s exactly what we want. We don’t want to grow or shrink. If we can stay the same and keep our academic quality as good or better, that’s a good thing. But that’s expensive, because it’s more and more expensive to get people to come to your school.”
The discount rate – which measures the difference between the “sticker price” of tuition and what students actually pay after receiving financial aid packages – was 38 percent for Providence College’s Class of 2018, Lena said. That means that students as a whole paid 62 percent of that sticker price, he said. Providence College’s tuition, not including fees or room and board, is $43,443, according to the school website.
Recruitment strategies at PC, RISD and Brown remain aggressive when it comes to seeking out the best qualified candidates, school leaders say, but growth is not pursued for its own sake.
“We have a number we don’t want to exceed: 1,560 maximum,” said Jim Miller, Brown’s dean of admission. “It’s a capacity issue for us. We have a commitment to house all of our first-year students together and provide on-campus housing for four years so we have a limited capacity, and we reach it every year.”
At RISD, a small student-to-faculty ratio and finite amount of studio space require the school to target approximately 462 freshmen a year, said Ed Newhall, associate vice president of enrollment, through a spokeswoman.
“We are fully enrolled and at our ideal class size,” said Newhall. “Regardless of the size of the applicant pool, we’re still pulling the same number.”
When it comes to recruitment, Lena says nuances in the application process, like whether or not to require a second personal essay on why a student wants to come to the college, affect the completion rate of applications. The college found that a number of students completing the application for admission stopped at the extra essay, so for the Class of 2019, PC also is making it optional.
“We suspect that the extra work deterred some people from completing their application,” he said.
Other factors frustrated applicants, too, like a computer glitch that interrupted the Common Application process. All told, thousands of applications ended up being dropped as incomplete, he said.
“We want to get 3.5 percent of that drop [in completed applications] back,” Lena said. “It’s highly competitive.”
While the school doesn’t want to grow or shrink, PC wants more applications, “because it gives us more flexibility in who we admit,” Lena said. Recruiting top students means enrollment is never about “just numbers,” he added, but rather whether “you are getting the quality of class you want.”
To that end, PC is doubling the number of applicant interviews from about 500 to 1,000; has hired a new firm to do its branding; is producing new recruitment publications to reflect a consistent brand; allowing deferral in early-decision applications; and increasing the number of high school visits in strategic markets, he said. •

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