MU to buck enrollment trend

By Allie Blood
March 18, 2008

Junior Leah Fowler leads a tour group of prospective students toward Brady Commons on Monday. The university is increasing recruiting efforts to counter a national decline in high school graduation rates.

Graphic/Megan Decker

(Click graphic to enlarge)

MU’s enrollment won’t follow a national decline in enrollment resulting from dropping high school graduation rates, Vice Provost for Enrollment Management Ann Korschgen said.

Due to population trends, graduating high school classes are smaller. Ann Korschgen said while the national graduation trend is declining, most of the university’s feeder schools are not experiencing similar decreases.

“Even though there’s going to be a pretty dramatic decline (in the national trend), we think we’ll have steady enrollment,” Korschgen said.

In order to mitigate the decline, Korschgen said the university has several methods of boosting enrollment.

First, Korschgen said that building relationships with community colleges is important to raise the number of transfer students. She said the university also has representatives out-of-state, including one in Dallas and two in Chicago.

“Since they’ve been working we’ve seen a significant raise in out-of-state applications,” Korschgen said.

She said that a committee has been assembled to track demographics and data to decipher reasons why enrollment might drop and what MU can do to combat these.

MU is also using high school programs to recruit students. MU targeted Missouri high school students through ambassador programs, in which MU students visit high schools and talk to graduating seniors.

In October 2006, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation invited MU to apply for a grant to encourage high school and community college students to apply for four-year universities. The foundation gave MU one of 10 $1 million grants to begin a college access program. MU and the other nine schools were chosen from 54 other institutions. Other recipients include Brown University, University California-Berkeley and The University of Utah, said Jeff Williams, assistant to the vice provost for enrollment management.

Williams said that this is not an MU recruitment tool, but rather a program to help Missouri students.

“We want to help low-income students get interested in colleges,” Williams said.

Williams said that MU’s proposal stood out because it integrated community colleges and high schools.

This program will target three community colleges and eight high schools across the state. Korschgen said that recent MU graduates would go to schools and help students fill out applications for admission and financial aid.

“We want to be supportive for students because sometimes they are in an environment that is not very encouraging,” Korschgen said.

The program will begin in the fall of 2008.

While overall enrollment is expected to decline, the percentage of minority students is growing, said Noor Azizan-Gardner, the Chancellor’s Diversity Initiative diversity programming and professional development director. The Chancellor’s Diversity Initiative oversees diversity programs on campus.

According to the MU Institutional Research Web site, in the fall of 2006, approximately 20 percent of new students were nonwhite, as compared to 18 percent in 1997.

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