October 2, 2011
By Audrey Williams June
Caution on the part of graduate-admissions counselors and potential students has been a key factor driving a nationwide dip in first-time graduate-student enrollment, the first such drop in seven years, says a report released in September.
Some universities have significantly scaled back some of their postbaccalaureate programs, although most institutions have not made widespread reductions. A number of campuses, both private ones that have seen endowment losses and public ones confronting cuts in appropriations, have chosen to trim enrollments in some programs to make sure that they do not commit to more new students than they can afford to support or put the financial support of current students at risk. Programs in the humanities were more likely to see cuts than those in the sciences, which are often supported by federal grants. Graduate students also shied away from programs in fields that aren't known for awarding stipends, like education, business, and public administration, which all saw declines in enrollment, according to the enrollment report by the Council of Graduate Schools.
That report found that between the fall of 2009 and the fall of 2010, enrollment of new students fell by 1.1 percent.
At the University of Chicago, the humanities division cut the number of incoming Ph.D. students after the economic downturn began to squeeze the college's coffers. Just before the recession hit, the division had committed to providing all of its 120 or so new graduate students with five years of tuition, a stipend, two summers of financial support, and health insurance. Now the division is taking in fewer students, with about 80 new enrollments in the fall of 2009 and in the fall of 2010. This year 84 new students enrolled.
"I don't want to be one of those people who brings in a huge number of people and then says, Half of you are not going to succeed," said Marla Roth, dean of the humanities division at the University of Chicago. "We did that to make sure we could support the students who were here already and then to be honorable to the students who we're bringing in." Each student costs the university well over $75,000 per year, she said.
That same motivation also pushed Yale University to "slightly reduce" its Ph.D. programs in the fall of 2010. Yale supports its graduate students with money from the income the university earns on its endowment, which amounted to $19.4-billion at the end of the fiscal year that ended June 30. But when the recession caused the endowment to shrink, and its subsequent income to fall, the university couldn't afford to cover the costs of as many students.
The cuts in graduate students weren't across the board, said Thomas D. Pollard, dean of the graduate school, and they played out differently in various programs. In all, 10-percent fewer offers were made to applicants for graduate programs in the fall of 2010.
The cuts were "carefully engineered" to help the graduate school weather the temporary decline in its finances, Mr. Pollard said. "We're going year by year," he said.
Tight Budgets
At some institutions, officials said they weren't surprised that fewer students had enrolled. Steven W. Matson, dean of the graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said applications for the fall of 2010 were "as high, or higher," than in years past, but in tight budget times the university has less money available to support graduate students, particularly new ones. The incoming graduate-student class that year ended up being "slightly smaller" than it was the year before.
"I worked hard to minimize the impact of any budget cuts on the students who are already on campus," said Mr. Matson, who cautioned the directors of graduate programs to "be circumspect in the admission of new students."
At Bowling Green State University, administrators are grappling with how to increase overall graduate enrollments after a 13-percent drop. In the fall of 2010, the university had 2,899 graduate students. This fall, 2,519 graduate students are enrolled.
Officials said they were expecting a steep drop in the wake of a policy to shift away from heavily discounting tuition for graduate students and a restructuring of the graduate school. "We're trying to encourage programs to go after paying students," said Michael Ogawa, interim dean of the graduate college.
Mr. Ogawa said graduate programs in the humanities seem to be losing the most students, judging from the anecdotes he's heard, because "fee-paying students just aren't there." There is also anecdotal evidence that "more students than we're accustomed to" have signed contracts and then not shown up, Mr. Ogawa said. "It's probably an issue of personal finances, but we don't know for sure."
Meanwhile, the graduate-student numbers at some universities run counter to the national trend.
At Emory University, new graduate-student enrollment has rebounded after officials there purposely curbed it two years ago to help cut the graduate school's budget. The goal then, said Lisa Tedesco, the graduate-school dean, was to respond to budgetary pressures while sustaining the commitment Emory had made to students already in the program.
"We didn't want to cut their financial support, their health insurance, or their funds for professional and career development," Ms. Tedesco said.
The entering class in the fall of 2009 was 319 students, down from more than 400 in the previous fall. This fall, following the addition of two new master's programs, first-time graduate-student enrollment is back where it was before the cuts, at 411 students, Ms. Tedesco said.
"That's not saying person-for-person and program-for-program we're the same, but with new approaches to budgets and sharing between units, we've been able to get back to where we were over all," Ms. Tedesco said.
Elsewhere, Cornell University saw first-time enrollment for postbaccalaureate students increase by 9.8 percent from the fall of 2009 to the fall of 2010. The number of first-time doctoral students, who typically receive four or five years of support at Cornell, rose by 16.8 percent.
Barbara Knuth, dean of the graduate school, said that sharp increase is probably linked to the money available to support such students. Cornell "has been quite successful," she said, in securing federal stimulus money for research that was, in turn, used to support doctoral students through federally financed research assistantships.
The number of new students seeking master's degrees increased at Cornell, too. Professional master's degrees, such as in engineering or landscape architecture, saw an increase of 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010, while the number of new students seeking other types of master's degrees increased by 8 percent. Master's students typically pay for their education, and doing so during a recession may mean that "those students see that degree as a good investment," Ms. Knuth said.
Other colleges hope their potential students will come to the same conclusions about the worth of their degrees. Still, some administrators say they are seeing signs that people are weighing their decisions very carefully.
At Florida State University, the rhetoric and composition program's new-student enrollment has been relatively steady in recent years, at about eight students. The program has about 23 master's and Ph.D. students. Even so, Kathleen Yancey, a professor of English and director of the graduate program in rhetoric and composition, said potential students this year seem to be weighing more carefully where to attend graduate school and, perhaps, even whether to pursue a graduate degree at all.
"Usually people will write and say, This is who I am, and I'm interested in your program and what can you tell me about it?" Ms. Yancey said. "But this year we've had some people who seem to be very, very intentional. We have one person doing a three-day visit in October and another coming in November."
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