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Friday, January 13, 2012
Applications soar at area colleges
Driven by a weak job market, aggressive recruiting efforts and the trend of high school students applying to multiple colleges, some area universities are seeing a significant increase in the number of applications for next fall.
The University of Dayton set a new record with 12,582 applications for the incoming freshman class with several weeks to go before its March 1 deadline. That breaks last year’s record of 12,317 applications.
Cedarville University in Greene County also has seen an increase in student interest, receiving about 8 percent more applications than last year.
Meanwhile, Wright State University said it’s too early to tell how its numbers are trending because it accepts applications until the week before classes start.
At Miami University, nearly twice as many high school students have submitted “early decision” applications, indicating they are committed to attending the university and will confirm enrollment if accepted. Those rose 96 percent, from 466 in 2010 to 913 in late December, a spokeswoman said. Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers in Washington, said there’s been a national trend in the past decade of students applying to more colleges.
“It’s easier to apply to multiple places because of technology,” he said. Thanks to a Common Application program in which more schools are participating, “with the click of a mouse, a student can submit to 10, 12, 20 schools.”
Kathy McEuen Harmon, UD’s assistant vice president and dean of admission and financial aid, said the university has participated since 2008 in the online Common Application program that now includes 456 schools, “so an increase in applications most likely is not related to this participation.”
Work continues at UD on a $25 million student housing project at Brown and Caldwell streets that officials say must be completed by move-in day in August. The apartments for 427 upperclassmen and some international students will expand student housing on the campus.
The current UD freshman and sophomore classes are very large and have “created an even higher demand for our housing than we already have. We also have a record number of international students. Those two things coupled together have made that housing quite a necessity,” said Beth Keyes, UD’s vice president for facilities management.
University officials say they do not plan to overfill the fall 2012 class and will become more selective due to the large number of applications. The incoming class size likely will be kept under 2,000 students, Harmon said.
“The selectivity is not to become an elite school,” she said. “It’s to maintain the value we think we offer our students.”
Harmon said the university — which has 11,000 students, including about 7,500 undergraduates — has strived to stay at a certain size “where we think the sense of community will thrive. If we get too large we’ll lose something, and that’s never been our goal.”
Harmon says one factor in the increase in applications is UD’s strategy of broadening its outreach outside Ohio. Of UD’s 12,582 applications received so far, 6,925 (55 percent) have come from outside the state, while 5,657 have come from Ohio.
She noted that the number of Ohio applicants have increased as well, with 635 more than last year at this time.
Janice Supplee, Cedarville University’s vice president for enrollment management and marketing, said their application numbers are running slightly ahead of the pace to reach a goal of 3,333 freshman applications this year.
“We’ve been very proactive about our recruitment effort, so obviously we hope those efforts are continuing to pay off,” she said.
Because of the national trend of students applying to multiple schools at once, she said Cedarville closely monitors those numbers.
“I just don’t think you can put a huge amount of trust in the application number,” she said. “We have to continue to recruit all the way through the cycle.”
She also has heard about some students putting down multiple deposits, a trend that Nassirian said is related to students trying to hedge their bets during a weak economy.
The economy “certainly contributes to the uncertainty because family finances are becoming less certain and it’s probably made people a little more price-sensitive,” Nassirian said.
Though it may seem counter-intuitive, he said some students might be willing to put down multiple deposits “thinking it’s better to risk a few hundred bucks and cover their bases in case one school proves a lot more workable for them financially.”
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