by Jeremy Hunt
Daily Lobo
Student enrollment may be down for the second year in a row, but Provost Reed Dasenbrock said it's important to keep the decline in context.
The freshman class nearly doubled over a 10-year period before this year's 1.76 percent decline, he said.
In 1996, the beginning freshman class had 1,629 students. In 2005, it had 3,095.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Terry Babbitt, associate vice president for enrollment management, said enrollment is reaching a plateau after so many years of increase.
"I don't think one year of more what I would call a leveling off, as opposed to a drop, is necessarily bad," he said. "We certainly don't want to be in a downward trend."
Curt Porter, associate vice president of planning, budget and analysis, said he does not expect tuition to increase as a result of the decline.
"Nobody's talking about that," he said. "It would probably cause enrollment to go down more."
Porter said the University will transfer $1.5 million from other departments to cover the revenue lost because of the decrease.
"It's not a cut of funding," he said. "It's out of existing balances."
Dasenbrock said the number of New Mexico high school graduates decreased.
Fewer high school graduates contributed to the 2.23 percent decrease in first-time freshmen, Babbitt said.
A 2.7 percent decrease in the number of New Mexico high school students taking the ACT also accounts for some of the drop, he said. If there are less students taking the ACT, there are less students planning on going to college, he said.
"The number of students graduating from New Mexico high schools have started to decline and is projected to go down over 15 percent over 15 years," Dasenbrock said.
Babbitt said the University plans to address the smaller market of New Mexico high school graduates by improving out-of-state recruitment.
"We have to look at initiatives to offer more financial aid and more scholarship incentives for out-of-state students to where we think we'll be successful," he said.
Dasenbrock said the transition from ITEL to LoboWeb could have kept some people from registering, because they waited until the last minute. A month before classes started, there were 8 percent fewer students registered than the year before, he said.
The retention rate has affected the enrollment level as well, Dasenbrock said. The University is seeing more students in need of remedial courses, and they often do not come back after their first and second semesters, he said.
"What this tells me is we need to work much harder in the K-12 sector in terms of getting students prepared," he said.
Dasenbrock said it is not only a problem in New Mexico but also across the country.
"The national problem is Americans come to college not ready for college-level study, especially for math," he said. "We all share responsibility for this."
Babbitt said the decline is no cause for panic.
"When you look at our student body and the number of students we can accommodate, I don't think the number is alarming," he said. "We've had several years of really positive growth."
