TABLE OF CONTENTS    FRONT PAGE    NEXT ARTICLE   PREVIOUS ARTICLE

Enrollment task force ponders problems of growth

Faced over the next decade with an expected surge in the number of North Carolina high school graduates, the University will spend the summer grappling with whether enrollment should increase.

A 16-member task force headed by Provost Dick Richardson will wrestle with all the complications presented by thousands more high school graduates wanting to attend Carolina. While no suggestion yet has been made on how many more students should enroll, the state wants to know how much of the expected flood can be absorbed by North Carolina's 16 state universities.

Estimates of future North Carolina high school graduates vary widely. While some call for 30,000 to 50,000 more students graduating in 2008 than in 1998, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction predicts about 14,350 more graduates in 2006, the last year for which it has projections. Demographic trends and North Carolina's population growth are driving the increase.

The recommendations from the Task Force on Student Enrollment, coupled with decisions by the Board of Trustees and Board of Governors, will have vast implications for the University, according to Chancellor Michael Hooker.

"If we grow enrollment, we will have to add new faculty and new buildings, both of which will be felt strongly," Hooker said. "If done properly, growth could represent a very positive opportunity for us. It would enable us to add academic emphasis in inter-disciplinary areas not well represented now, for example. It could be tied in nicely to the Master Plan effort now under way.

"If done badly it would add to the congestion, the traffic, course scheduling problems, among other problems. That's why the provost's task force is so important. The `how' question is almost as important as the `whether' question."

Why expand?

With so many potential problems that could be caused by increasing the current enrollment of more than 24,000, why doesn't the University just say no to more students?

The reason is that the Board of Governors has asked all state universities to do their part in accommodating the expected rise in enrollment systemwide.

Recent history shows that the Board of Governors makes a priority of funding capital projects for campuses coping with enrollment increases, said Joni Worthington, assistant vice president for communication at the General Administration.

"Budget priorities change biannually and in recent biennia the highest priority has been to meet current and future enrollment needs," Worthington said.

Making the issue even more complicated for the University is what Hooker has called "the politics of size." This refers to enrollment trends showing that Carolina will slip from the second to the fourth largest of the state's universities, Richardson explained at the May Board of Trustees meeting. Richardson said the trustees would have to decide if it is in the University's long-term interest to slip to fourth in size.

Right now Carolina is smaller only than N.C. State, but both UNC-Charlotte and East Carolina University will soon pass Carolina if it does not grow.

Enrollment at Carolina has increased from 23,579 total students in 1988 to 24,189 in 1997.

The task ahead

The work facing Richardson's task force starts with a request from the General Administration that all 16 campuses consider three scenarios, Worthington said. Those scenarios are:

• How many students could each campus absorb with current facilities?

• If the campus has room for expansion, how many more students could be enrolled with new facilities, what would those new facilities be and how much would they cost?

• Look creatively at how many more students could be absorbed through expanded efforts in distance learning, evening classes and other non-traditional programs.

  The information submitted by each campus will be used to help the Board of Governors set spending priorities in future budgets, Worthington said.

  As Richardson told the Board of Trustees, the Task Force for Student Enrollment will build on that request and address questions such as:

• If enrollment is going to grow, how much should it grow? This recommendation will be based in part on the growth plans of the state's 15 other campuses.

• If the University grows, should there be any change in the mix of undergraduate-to-graduate students? Right now that mix is 60/40, Richardson said, and there is no effort under way to alter that ratio. But the ratio may need to be addressed given that the problem the state must address pertains to an increase in undergraduate students.

• To what extent should and could programs such as distance learning and evening courses be expanded?

• How much would any enrollment expansion cost? And once a cost is known, how does the University go about helping General Administration get the legislature started on approving expansion projects quickly to be ready for the additional students?

• What impact would expanded enrollment have on the Town of Chapel Hill?

Another challenge to the task force is that the panel doesn't have much time to answer these difficult questions. Richardson told the Board of Trustees that even with the difficulties of getting a group together during the summer, the task force would issue a report in early fall.

Next article
Previous article
Table of contents
Front Page

To UNC-CH Home Page