Enrollment at Vincennes University is down for the fall semester, about 5 percent, and while that news was bad it wasn’t unexpected by board members when they met Monday morning in the Fort Sackville rooms at the Isaac K. Beckes Student Union.
In preparing the university’s biennial budget, Phil Rath, vice president for finance and government relations, had based funding on a 12-percent drop in enrollment.
Kristi Deetz, senior director of external relations, said VU was not “immune” to the downward trend in higher education enrollment that is being experienced throughout the country, partly as a result of improvements in the economy.
She said the university was seeing a decline in the number of students considered “adult learners,” those over 24.
In bad economic times, such as the years 2009-11, enrollment in that age group traditionally increases because they’re the ones who are returning to school either to improve their chances of getting a job or to learn new skills to keep their jobs.
Deetz said the future of the university’s enrollment would more resemble 2008 than 2010, when VU saw its highest enrollment in a number of years. She said her department was “resetting the clock to 2008” as it planned for the future, which meant honing its recruitment efforts to target markets that had been sending high numbers of students to campus but which this year weren’t.
Deetz said the university was going to expand its efforts to serve the northern and eastern sections of the state, even opening an admissions office in that region. And she said VU would continue to heavily market in Marion County and the “doughnut” counties surrounding Indianapolis.
Deetz said the main source of enrollment, Knox and surrounding counties, are forecast to produce fewer high school graduates in the years ahead so it was important for VU to search for more-fertile ground for potential students.
Board member Mike Sievers, owner of Sievers & Co., 328 N. Second St., said it was vital for the university to have an effective marketing program because the supply of students is shrinking while the competition from other colleges and universities is increasing.
He said the goal shouldn’t be just to “compete” against those other schools but “to win” by enrolling more students than they do.
Deetz said her department was constantly evaluating which recruitment efforts work and tailoring others to fit specific needs.
She said the PreVU Days program, in which high school students and often their parents are invited to visit campus, is proving to be highly effective, with around half of those students who visit ultimately enrolling.
That’s why the university was fine-tuning that program to make it even more attractive to students and their parents but also to high school counselors and administrators, Deetz said.
“We’re looking at how we can better accommodate their schedules, what days are best for them, how we can customize an itinerary for them, those types of things,” she said. “We want to do whatever we can to make their visit as productive for them as well as for us.”
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