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Although Iowa is producing fewer high school graduates, local colleges have seen enrollment numbers near or at all-time highs, and some are hoping those figures will increase further.

“This past fall we enrolled the third-largest (class) on record, with 4,347 freshmen,” said Marc Harding, director of admissions for Iowa State University.

In the 2005 and 2006 fall semesters, Harding said, ISU enrolled 3,769 and 3,983 first-year students, respectively. ISU had been trying to increase the number of enrollments after a four-year decline that followed the largest class on record, 4,654 freshmen, in 2001.

“We have been looking to grow the past couple of years,” Harding said. “We want to stabilize our numbers, to build the classes and keep (ISU) at a size the president and community think is a good size.”

Changing student markets

After Grand View College increased full-time day enrollment by 43 percent between 2000 and 2004, the size of its student body leveled off. Like Iowa State, Grand View is working to bring enrollments back up.

“We are expecting another enrollment boost this coming fall,” said Debbie Barger, vice president for enrollment management at Grand View. “We have been working pretty hard at some repositioning of the college. It takes time, but we are starting to see results; we are starting to compete with other private colleges.”

Grand View’s enrollment has flattened over the past three years, Barger said, since growing from 929 in fall 2000 to 1,305 in fall 2004. In the 2007 fall semester, Grand View enrolled 1,251 students. “It’s early in the game, but a guesstimate for fall 2008: We are hoping to be around the 1,300 to 1,325 range,” she said.

To make itself more appealing to prospective students, Grand View is offering new academic programs, building new facilities and adding more athletic teams. The school’s first football and wrestling programs will begin with the fall 2008 semester. Biotechnology, physical education and sports management will be added to the class catalog for fall 2008. Grand View also built a residence hall that opened in fall 2007.

“We are working hard to create (a vibrant campus) here, so students who are looking for that traditional experience can find that here,” Barger said.

The Center for Community Advancement Professions, a new academic building being constructed at Grand View, should open this fall. The facility will house the art and education departments and some social sciences programs, such as psychology, as well as a teaching laboratory, observation classrooms and some instructional resources for faculty.

“The art program has grown substantially, and the building will allow the space they have been needing,” Barger said. “We are intending to grow the education program; (the building) will allow for the kind of facilities that we think will enhance our program.”

More jobs, more students

After Des Moines Area Community College set an enrollment record at its six campuses in fall 2007, its spring 2008 enrollment was even larger.

“We are not growing just to be growing,” said DMACC President Rob Denson. “We are growing because the jobs are there.”

Fall semester 2007 credit enrollment rose 8.7 percent and credit-hour enrollment increased 7.5 percent at the six campuses, setting two records. The DMACC had 18,320 students enrolled in credit courses, up from 16,854 students for fall 2006. The number of credit hours students enrolled in rose to 154,822 in fall 2007, compared with 143,974 in fall 2006.

With the 2008 spring semester came new enrollment records for DMACC. The school enrolled 18,365 students taking 151,942 credit hours in the semester that began Jan. 7. The record number of students enrolled in spring semester exceeded the fall enrollment for the second consecutive year. DMACC’s six campuses had 17,697 students in spring 2007.

DMACC also set a record for the number of students from minority groups enrolled. Denson said the increase is an indicator that DMACC is “reaching out to everyone.” The fall semester 2007 non-white credit enrollment reached 14 percent, up from 13.1 percent in the fall 2006.

“We are on a fast track, and it is mainly because the jobs are here,” he said. “We want to make sure Iowa businesses have workers to fill the jobs.”

This growth, Denson said, means campuses are “virtually out of space.” With increased enrollments and new academic and certificate programs, Denson said, “we need to be building a lot more” facilities, and funding is needed. Staff members are marketing the school, and the board is working to keep the tuition affordable.

Denson said DMACC is projected to have 40,000 students enrolled in 2016. He said school officials are talking about building campuses in Perry and in Warren and Marion counties.

Staying small

Drake University enrolled its largest class in 30 years for the 2007 fall semester, and its leaders do not want to do it again.

“Last fall we enrolled 924 students, about 100 students more than we would like,” said Tom Delahunt, Drake’s vice president of admissions and student financial planning. The school’s facilities better serve around 830 students, he said.

After two years of strong demand, Drake has had to make some changes to keep its “promise” and provide a campus with university amenities that still feels small. The school hired additional faculty members and added residential space. Last summer, the school added orientation systems and worked with the bookstore and food services so that there were “no long lines anywhere,” Delahunt said.

The admission process will also be different for the fall 2008 semester. Drake will adopt a lower acceptance rate, which Delahunt said is a “positive” thing; he said the school will be “harder to get into than in decades.”

The increase in applications has stemmed from strategic marketing decisions. Over the last several years, Drake has tweaked the ways in which it reaches out to prospective students, he said. The university is attracting the right kind of students, he said, and those students have more access to information about the school and know what they want.

Fewer high school grads

The number of high school graduates in the Midwest and Iowa is projected to decline, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), which facilitates resource sharing among higher education systems in western states and also collects data on the Midwest region.

“There are fewer graduating high school seniors; it is competitive in the Midwest,” ISU’s Harding said.

Iowa’s public and private high schools graduated 35,933 students in the 2001-2002 school year, according to WICHE data collected in 2003. The projected number of graduates for the 2007-2008 school year is 35,307; for 2017-2018, it is 33,259.

High schools in the Midwest graduated 711,395 students for the 2001-2002 school year. WICHE projects that 755,623 students will graduate in 2007-2008 and 726,881 will graduate in 2017-2018.

With fewer graduating seniors and competition from community colleges, private colleges and state universities, Harding said there could be “all kinds of challenges” in increasing enrollment in the future.