Colleagues,

As the college’s chief enrollment officer, I’d like to respond to Kit’s request for clarification regarding strategic increases in enrollments. I am impressed that our discussions regarding the budget have caused a virtual epiphany for many who now seem to be fully cognizant of the immutable relationship between our enrollments and the financial health of the institution – something that, heretofore, only I seemed motivated to talk about. This relationship between tuition income and fiscal health is exacerbated by the withdrawal of state support, which, in reality, is privatizing the academy. In the economy of the academy, academic programs with high enrollments subsidize those with low enrollments. For the most part, such enrollments are driven by demand in the marketplace. Therefore, if we were to strategically increase enrollments in any significant way, we would do so by admitting more people into the most popular programs because that is where excess demand exists.

Let me continue by offering a brief enrollment management primer. The first order of business in enrollment management is to ensure that there are sufficient enrollments to pay the bills. There are three key variables that influence enrollment – admission activity, retention/attrition, and graduation rates. These variables are highly interrelated. High graduation rates require high retention rates, high retention is driven by the academic quality of the student body and the quality of their academic experience, and public perception of institutional quality drives demand for admission. Public perception is chiefly influenced by what our students say about their experiences when they go home.

Without sufficient capacity for growth in popular academic programs, admitting more students will diminish the quality of their experience, thus negatively impacting retention, graduation, and public perception. We risk unraveling what has been a rather successful model for contributing to institutional success. So, the question becomes, is there sufficient capacity to consider increasing enrollments by admitting more students? There are three points of admission activity where such increases could theoretically be made – graduate admissions, freshman admissions and undergraduate transfer admissions.

In the short term, it would be extremely difficult to increase enrollment at the graduate level because there currently is insufficient market demand across the programs to do so. The graduate programs offer the best opportunity to expand enrollments, however, because this is where the institution has the greatest capacity for growth.

At the undergraduate level, the picture is far different. There is an unprecedented level of demand for admission to the institution – fourteen applicants for each available seat in the freshman class and 6 applicants for each seat in the transfer class. The problem is that at the undergraduate level, there is little room to expand enrollments in any meaningful way.

On the academic side, we are limited by available faculty and class sections, classrooms, studios, labs, and academic support services such as computer labs and academic advisors. On the student services side, the residence halls are well over capacity. This fall, there were 900 students residing in triple rooms, representing one-third of the total residence hall population and the building systems were not designed to house such numbers on anything but a temporary or transitional basis. The dining facilities are operating at or over capacity, as are other services such as the Health and Counseling centers. Additionally, the Village and Town do not have sufficient rental stock to accommodate any planned growth in the off-campus student population; even at current enrollments, this continues to be a point of friction between the local community and the campus.

We could consider, as suggested in one comment, increasing the transfer population as many of them do not require housing. Although this bypasses the on-campus housing shortage, it does not address the impact on other essential services. In terms of academic capacity, most transfer students enter New Paltz as declared majors at the upper division level, which is where, for many disciplines, we are already at capacity. This was well evidenced this spring when academic advisors and staff in Records & Registration were assisting entering transfer students who were rather traumatized by their inability to develop meaningful course schedules due to courses being enrolled at capacity. The capacity issues are further exacerbated by the fact that a disproportionately large number of transfer applicants are interested in a small number of very popular majors that could already be considered oversubscribed.

We do, as a practice, attempt to exceed our official enrollment targets by a percentage point or two, in order to collect and retain excess revenues to be rolled over and allocated in the following fiscal year. Because of the budget problems which were emerging early in 2008, we did become a little more aggressive in pushing the envelope on undergraduate admissions in order to exceed our enrollment/revenue targets for the 2008-09 fiscal year. However, managing admissions activity, retention, and graduation rates is not an exact science and as a result of an unanticipated jump in yield, we produced the largest freshman class in our history (by a large margin) and our transfer admission numbers were robust as well. Subsequently, we pushed our academic, residential, and service resources to their limits and thus exceeded our revenue targets by an estimated five hundred thousand dollars, which will offset a modest portion of the reserve funds we are spending to cover expenses for the current fiscal year.

We will continue to strive to carefully exceed our enrollment targets in order to collect additional revenues, but the enrollment increases of a magnitude necessary to achieve a short-term improvement in our 2009-10 financial position are either not currently possible or would be predictably destructive to the quality of the academic enterprise.

L. David Eaton

Vice President, Enrollment Management