Stepped-up marketing to international and out-of-state students in recent years is paying off for the University Rhode Island.
A 2017 survey of 500 U.S. colleges and universities found that the number of newly enrolled international students had declined by 7 percent on average, according to a January report in the Boston Globe. The data is a potentially troubling sign for many U.S. universities that have long relied on full-tuition-paying foreign students to help offset declining enrollment.
URI, however, continues to see increases in international and out-of-state student enrollment, which has helped it offset a plateauing in the number of in-state students and ongoing struggles to boost state aid.
Since 2009, international enrollment at URI, though still small, has steadily increased from 31 that year to 202 (0.014 percent of the total) in 2017.
Beginning in 2010, the number of out-of-state and international students began an uninterrupted rise from 4,753 to last year’s total of 6,601.
The tuition and fee rate charged to international/out-of-state students has also steadily risen, from $23,038 in 2008, the height of the Great Recession, to $30,042 in 2017. Comparatively, in-state tuition was $8,184 in 2008 and $13,792 in 2017.
Donald H. DeHayes, URI’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, acknowledged a “heightened” focus on high-tuition-paying students over the past decade because “the state was unable to provide basic support.”
According to DeHayes, “80-85 percent” of URI’s operating budget is funded by tuition, with the remainder often made up by state appropriation.
However, per URI data, state funding fell from $82.5 million in fiscal 2007 to $57.6 million in fiscal 2012 and has bumped back up to about $77 million in fiscal 2018.
Along with the increased marketing efforts outside Rhode Island, DeHayes also credited improved programming for the increase in international and out-of-state enrollment.
“The value of URI in the marketplace has gone up,” he said.
That’s especially important to the school at a time when the rate of in-state student enrollment has plateaued in recent years, according to Dean Libutti, URI’s vice provost for enrollment management. He attributed that to a “drastic decline” in the number of recent Rhode Island high school graduates.
While the school continues to work to enroll more Rhode Islanders, an increasingly diverse student body brings its own benefits.
“All our students, whether they grew up in Rhode Island or someplace else, are going to work and interact in a global economy,” DeHayes said. “The real value of [more] international students has been to globalize the campus.”
