The university is just too popular for its own good.
A high yield — the percentage of admitted students who come to the university — has thwarted university efforts to decrease enrollment during the past few years. Fewer students would mean more money per student, which would ensure academic quality, administrators have said.
“Every time you admit a student, you lose money, basically,” university President Dan Mote said. “The tuition doesn’t come close to paying for it, and the state appropriation doesn’t either. … As you admit more students, you’re going to end up reducing the quality of your program by spending less money per student.”
Numbers released earlier this month by the university system underscore the difficulty of the problem. While freshman enrollment increased 7.5 percent this year, system projections call for the university to decrease its undergraduate population by slightly more than 6 percent by 2016. Graduate student enrollment would decrease about 4 percent. Overall enrollment would decline by 2,125.
University system projections call for the undergraduate population to decrease by 1,684 students, more than a 6-percent reduction. Graduate student enrollment would decrease about 4 percent. By 2016, administrators want to decrease total enrollment by 2,125 to 35,095, according to projections presented to the Board of Regents — a 17-member panel of gubernatorial appointees that oversees the university system — earlier this month.
Admitting too many students can have undesirable results such as large classes and excess demand on facilities, Mote said.
“If we have programs we’re offering that are not excellent and we can’t afford to make them excellent, then we should ask ourselves why we offer them at all,” he said.
The University System of Maryland’s plans call for more high school students to attend state universities in Baltimore County, Baltimore City, Salisbury and Frostburg. The University of Maryland University College is also supposed to see many more students enrolled in its primarily online courses, which would contribute to a 19-percent increase in system enrollment — to about 176,000 by 2019.
The current budget situation is a contributor to the university’s enrollment goals, but not the driving force, Mote said.
“Most of this focuses around money. And not just the current budget situation, I think it’s the historical budget circumstances,” he said. “We have never been funded according to the state’s guidelines, ever. And therefore we’re not in a position to expand enrollment.”
In contrast, Provost Nariman Farvardin wrote in an e-mail that “The goal of reducing enrollment has nothing to do with the budget situation,” but did not elaborate.
Changing the size of the university is not a new idea.
The Strategic Plan — a 10-year road map for the development of the university — calls for undergraduate enrollment to be adjusted “to an appropriate size.” Enrollment projections presented in 2008 to the regents show the university wanted to lower enrollment by 800 students by 2017.
“I think that College Park, in order to be a national flagship, has one important benchmark, and that’s how much money they have per student,” university system Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance Joe Vivona said.
Vivona said interest in attending the university — along with other universities in the system — has increased during the past few years as the country has battled a national recession and high unemployment.
“You offer opportunities to admit students, and then they accept,” Mote said. “So you have a fair amount of control over who you offer the admissions to, but you don’t have much control over who accepts.”
cox@umdbk.com
