By Laurie Babinski
Editor in Chief
With housing tight and classes filling quickly, many Seaver College students are wondering why Pepperdine’s only undergraduate school is preparing to admit its largest projected freshman and transfer class ever in fall 2002, an unprecedented 853 students.
University officials, however, said this week that an extra 175 freshmen and transfer students to replace exiting undergrads in the midst of an economic downturn is necessary to maintain the university’s enrollment and financial stability.
“For the economic health of the school, we have to ensure that we have full enrollment,” said Paul Long, dean of admission and enrollment management. According to Long, the extra freshmen and transfer students accepted for fall 2002 will be admitted because of 2002’s unusually large graduating class, an economic downturn and a decrease in the retention rate of the university.
Each year, the Enrollment Management Committee, comprised of representatives from Admissions, Campus Life, Residential Life, Institutional Research and the Dean’s office, meet to decide a target number of students desired for the upcoming academic year.
“That number we choose is based primarily on graduation and retention rates,” said Long, who chairs the committee.
But pegging those numbers is difficult. “We’d all love to say that the retention rate will be 95.6 percent every year,” Director of Admissions Michael Truschke said. “And it’s the same with the graduation rate. But we simply can’t do that. It’s more of an educated guess.”
The graduation rate estimates the percentage of students eligible to graduate in 2002. The retention rate estimates the percentage of Seaver students who are eligible to continue their undergraduate education at Pepperdine and will do so.
Both rates are affecting this year’s high enrollment numbers. Long and Truschke project the Seaver retention rate to dip 2 percent from last year’s 96 percent due to “the economic fear factor,” Long said. The large number of students graduating, 690, and other factors have contributed to the number of students leaving.
Based on the data compiled by the committee, the Admissions office set a figure to replace all of the students leaving the campus without increasing overall Seaver enrollment.
“We’re not a school that’s looking to grow in enrollment,” Truschke said. “We try to fill the spots of those who leave.”
Thus, despite the jump in the number of admitted students, the overall enrollment of Seaver College will only increase by a projected 26 students.
Long attributes this increase to a request by the administration to increase enrollment as a means of increasing revenue. According to Jeff Pippin, vice president of finance and administration, tuition constitutes 70-75 percent of the university’s operating budget. With the extra 26 students, the university stands to make an extra $2.5 million to $3 million on top of the extra revenue raised from the tuition increase for already enrolled students.
“(The administration wants) the extra money to cover extra budgetary expenses,” Long said. “That’s what they asked us to do.”
Students, however, are flustered by the lack of housing that increased enrollment is creating. While the increase in new student enrollment makes up for students graduating or leaving the university for other reasons, many of those students — seniors and upperclassmen— live off campus. The new freshmen are required to live on campus, creating the crunch.
But Long does not believe that the sole responsibility for the housing problem is the increase in admissions. “It’s not just that we’re letting more students in,” Long said. “We really don’t have enough housing to go around.
“A typical undergraduate class is about 700 students,” Long continued. As a result, the number of students required to live on campus, a combination of freshmen and sophomores, is about 1,400. Housing on campus is limited to about 1,750 spots, which leaves the upperclassmen with only about 350 spots on campus each year.
Other factors are also responsible for the housing hardship, including an increase in desire to upperclassmen to stay on campus, and an economic downturn that makes the high cost of living off campus impractical for some students.
“Seaver has built itself on a residential experience,” Truschke said. “And I know that RLO is doing its best to accommodate whoever they can.”
The waiting list for housing is more than 200 names long.
While RLO focuses on housing students, Long and Truschke are attempting to level off enrollment numbers to prevent large increases in enrollment like this year’s, which adversely affect campus operations like registration and RLO.
The leveling off, however, is difficult. Remedies include admitting more students in January, mid-year, thus diminishing the impact of a large freshmen class, and admitting more transfer students.
“We can bring in more transfers,” Long said. “But we prefer freshmen. We want them to get the total Pepperdine experience. Often times transfers don’t have time to adjust to the Pepperdine culture.”
A registration deadline for continuing students, now in its fourth year, is another enrollment management technique that has proven effective.
“The May 15 deadline for students who are returning to register is a key tool,” Long said. “We can control the returning student variable, which helps us hit our target enrollment more effectively to make sure that there are no surprises.”
But even as admissions looks to find ways to put a handle on the unpredictable numbers, both Long and Truschke know that there is no sure-fire solution.
“It’s a challenge every year,” Truschke said. “But it’s a challenge we’ve faced in the past, and I’m sure it’s a challenge we’ll face in the future.”
March 28, 2002