Enrollment at Park University decreased during the Fall 2013 semester, according to Alan J. Liebrecht, associate vice president for Enrollment Management.
The enrollment numbers are broken down into the 16-week daytime term as well as the Fall I and Fall II terms according to number of students enrolled by credit hours.
Total enrollment for Park University this fall is 11,067 students for 64,344 credit hours. The daytime program had 1,524 students for a total of 17,886 credit hours.
For Fall II term, as of Oct.29, enrollment was 8,169 students for 39,286 credit hours.
Liebrecht explained different statistics also included on the general enrollment information such as military students, international students and athletes.
“(Enrollment) is not growing,” Liebrecht said. “It’s shrinking. Enrollment is going down, total enrollment is going down.”
Taking into account military students, the number of students involved decreased for the Fall II term due to the government shutdown.
“Military student audience enrollments have been declining,” said Liebrecht. “Of course the government shut down that happened back in October significantly impacted our enrollment for the Fall II term, so we are still working on figuring out our military enrollment inside of the total enrollment.”
According to Liebrecht, military students use a special tuition assistance to pay education and due to the shutdown this benefit was taken away affecting enrollment at Park.
“During the government shut down they were not allowed to use that,” he said. “And obviously more students relied on that to pay their tuition and didn’t have it so it significantly impacted enrollment.”
The tuition assistance is back for some students, however, it is different for the various military branches. Also, temporary solutions have been made and new solutions are going to be implemented in January 2014.
“In January, they are going to have a new solution and this will impact the students to register in the spring term,” said Liebrecht. “About 50 percent of our total enrollment is military of the undergraduate students so that impacts about half of our student population.”
In 2012, 690 international students were enrolled from 102 different countries compare to this year’s statistics where 704 international students are enrolled from 98 different countries.
“International student enrollment last year went down,” said Liebrecht. “We are making a significant investment in changing that we are actually doing a lot of travelling to China, Vietnam and Indonesia to recruit students.”
Besides countries in Asia, staff from the enrollment services traveled to Central Europe and will recruit in South America to bring students to Park.
“We will also be going to South America in the spring and definitely visit Brazil,” said Liebrecht. “It’s been a good market for us. We’re also going to go visit other places like Colombia and Chile and we’ll be doing some education fairs in those places.”
According to Liebrecht, student athletes are doing well and teams have met their goals for this year.
“I think most of the teams were doing a pretty good job recruiting students,” said Liebrecht. “All of the teams have their roster goals for each team so we didn’t really see much change in the enrollment, team sizes are still the same and they all met their team targets and they are doing very well, the teams are very successful this year.”
Normally, fall enrollment is higher than spring and one difference this year from past years is the freshmen class statistics.
“We had one of the largest freshmen classes this year,” said Liebrecht. “About 209 freshmen were enrolled. We were at 154 three years ago so the freshmen class was pretty big this year.”
