Even as Regents pull the reins is UVSC headed to Eagle Mountain?

A few weeks ago a three-member committee made a recommendation to Utah's Board of Regents that would place a "moratorium on geographic expansion" for the system's public colleges and universities. The committee hopes that future growth can be handled through schedule juggling and a greater focus on distance education, at least until a statewide plan for expansion can be adopted. As you can imagine UVSC's Bill Sederburg, president of the state's fastest growing college, was none to pleased to hear that the kibosh is being put on his dreams of campus expansion.

UVSC chief pans plan that would limit growth (Deseret Morning News, April 19 2008)

Now on the heels of the Regents plans to manage growth, comes the news that UVSC and the up-and-coming berg of Eagle Mountain are looking into a possible UVSC satellite campus.

Satellite college campus may land in Eagle Mountain (Salt Lake Tribune, April 24 2008)

No mention of the proposed moratorium in the Trib article, but of course any plans for expansion would have to be approved by them, as well as the legislature. An interesting note on that committee that recommended the moratorium; one of the members is Jack Zenger, former Chair of UVSC's Board of Trustees. Fascinating that a man so familiar with UVSC's expansion needs would recommend such action. As Sederburg has pointed out satellite campuses will be absolutely necessary to accommodate the nearly 20,000 additional students the school projects will enroll in the next few decades. Sederburg believes that unless land is banked now there won't be any place to build down the road.

There is another interesting nugget in the Trib article; Val Peterson is quoted as saying that the main Orem Campus could only handle 28,000 students. Considering the recent uptick in growth (Sederburg predicted an additional 500 students this Fall) 28 K doesn't seem so far away.

But will students go to a satellite campus? If the Wasatch campus is any indication, probably not. The tone in the Trib article seems to indicate that they are marketing these satellites (another is planned for the south end of Utah County, most likely Spanish Fork) to working adults. That makes sense, but the question still remains if you build it will they come?

UVSC bucks statewide trend with positive enrollment numbers

The state Board of Education has released enrollment numbers for Utah's public colleges and universities, and while overall the numbers are flat UVSC gained the most students and had the second highest percentage of growth over last fall's numbers.

Enrollment remains flat at Utah colleges
Recruitment to become more competitive as numbers stay steady
(Salt Lake Tribune, October 12 2007)

While this news is no big surprise for UVSC, it is nice to see what numbers other schools are posting. Here are the headcounts for all nine schools:

U of U: 27,685 -2.15%
USU: 21,455 +1.10%
Weber: 17,089 -1.16%
SUU: 6,410 +4.94%
Snow: 3,202 -9.65%
Dixie: 5,209 -2.43%
CEU: 1,799 -3.95%
UVSC: 20,959 +3.44%
SLCC: 23,824 +0.01%

Higher Ed
Total: 127,632 -0.09%

If that number seems a little low for UVSC, who usually boasts of having 24,000 students we can only assume the state is not counting high school students taking in concurrent enrollment classes.

Local big wigs discuss the future of UVSC

This past Monday UVSC hosted a pow-wow with leaders from the state and local government , as well as business leaders and educators from throughout Utah County.


Leaders look at role of UVSC
Identity issues involving school, region discussed
(Deseret Morning News, October 9 2007)

One of the most interesting facts brought up during the meeting was this one:
For instance, Hispanic students are the majority in seven of Provo's 11 elementary schools, said RaDene Hatfield, president-elect of the Provo Council PTA.

A few months back there was an article in the Daily Herald said that all of UVSC's recruitment material was also available in Spanish. There were some in the community who complained that students should be able to speak English before going to college.

More minority students going to college
(Daily Herald, August 4 2007)

Clearly if UVSC is going to continue to meet the needs of the community it will need to reach out to Hispanic students and their parents (for who the Spanish recruitment material was intended for).

Masters of their Domain: More students are enrolling in graduate programs

In the last 15 years graduate school enrollment has gone up 38 percent, and as the job market demands more education UVSC is getting ready to enter the master's business.

More students going for master's degree
(Daily Herald, September 17 2007)

It looks like of the three master's programs UVSC wanted to start first (education, business, and nursing) it is education that has the most ducks in a row so far.

Utah college enrollment flat overall

Despite UVSC's positive numbers so far this year Utah overall only saw a meager .8 percent increase in college enrollment over last year's declining figures.

College enrollment shows a decline
(Salt Lake Tribune, September 15 2007)

But the important part of this story is that the Board of Regents anticipate that the state's Higher Ed system will experience an average of 3 percent growth annually over the next 20 years. According to their projections this is just the lull before the storm, and we should see real increase starting in 2013-2014.

So if the state as a whole is experiencing static enrollment right now, while UVSC is still growing, what does that mean for UVU when things really get hopping in a few years? UVU could have the largest student population in the state in just 10 years.

UVSC enrollment inches forward

The numbers for fall semester enrollment are being sent in to the state, and UVSC has posted a pretty impressive 2 percent gain over last year. That works out to 728 more students running around the halls of UVSC, for a total 23,750. This is good news as most other public schools in the state are posting flat enrollment over last year's numbers.

Fall 2007 Enrollment Progress
(Office of Institutional Research)

But the big news here is that Full-Time Equivalent enrollment has gone up nearly 3 percent. That means more students are taking bigger class loads, and most importantly, UVSC will see more money from the state.

First day of Fall Semester

UVSC's Fall Semester started Wednesday, and despite booming enrollment it looks like the kinks that have plagued the back-to-campus rush have been ironed out. Lines seemed shorter and no major outages for the school's UVLink computer system. All in all a good beginning to the last year as UVSC.

UVSC's final fall semester begins (Daily Herald, August 23 2007)

But the big story here just might be enrollment. Right now the school is running a nearly 7 percent increase compared to the numbers posted at this time last year. Of course the final fall numbers won't be posted for another 3 weeks, so look for that big percentage to drop each day until then. The Pipeline spoke with an administrator on Wednesday who said they are predicting about a 2 percent increase when all is said and done. Compared to most other schools in the state this year that is huge.

The total head count numbers will be helped considerably when the high schools start turning in their concurrent enrollment data at the beginning of September. Concurrent enrollment might he

The other impressive number this year is the Full Time Equivalent, which as of today sits at 15,448. As we all know the FTE calculates the number of students that are taking a full load, and it is the number that actually means something (the one used by the state to calculate funding). In fact the FTE for this year is already 98.6 percent of Fall '05 numbers, with just 93.4 percent of the headcount. That means students are taking more credits. More FTE means more funding, and hopefully more eventual graduates.

In fact, according to the most recent fact book put out by UVSC's Institutional Research office, the number of juniors and seniors has steadily risen over the past 5 years. Thats a sure sign that students are staying put, which might be the reason why headcount and FTE numbers are on the rise.

UVSC experiences big bump in summer enrollment numbers

Summer classes at colleges have never been terribly popular. For some reason students find other things to do outside the classroom. But this year UVSC has posted some impressive, albeit preliminary, numbers for their summer programming.

Summer 2007 Enrollment Data, Institutional Research (as of July 12, 2007)

On average (between the two most popular summer blocks) almost 900 more students attended summer classes this year. It could be that the school's policy of charging in-state tuition for everyone (including international students) has convinced some scholars to drop the tanning lotion and pick up the textbook.

Perhaps this trend will continue as the state's new residency rules take effect. In theory out-of-state students could come to UVSC fresh out of high school, take a full semester load of credits during the summer at in-state prices, then stick around Utah and work until the next summer. Then they can apply for permanent residency (as long as their parents don't claim them as dependents) and start paying tuition like a Utahan. In other words, savvy out-of-staters could attend UVSC without the outrageous penalties their older brothers and sisters faced.

For more info on the new residency requirements check out http://www.uvsc.edu/students/residency/

Minority enrollment on the rise at UVSC

Recently the Daily Herald ran a story talking about the state of minority populations in Utah's higher education institutions.

More minority students going to college (Daily Herald, August 4 2007)

The article says that only 9 percent of students in post-high school education are non-white. It goes on to point out that school's like UVSC are doing more to reach out to minority students interested in a college education.

And the recent numbers from the school's office of Institutional Research back up UVSC's increased focus on minority students. Since 2002 the school's percentage of non-white students has risen from just under 9 percent to almost 15 percent in 2006.

SLCC president makes student retention a top priority

Salt Lake Community College president Cynthia Bioteau is taking retention into her own hands by calling students personally if they haven't registered for fall classes yet.

Haven't registered for classes yet? You might get a call from SLCC president (Slat Lake Tribune, July 20 2007)

Maybe there is a lesson here for UVSC president Bill Sederburg. He is always moaning about the time-honored Wolverine tradition of waiting till the first day of class to register, and the headaches, network traffic, and long lines this inevitably causes. Perhaps Big Bill should get on the horn and convince procrastinating students to get on the ball.

Is this the end of Trades at UVSC?

Back in January of 2004, UVSC's monthly Board of Trustees meeting ventured away from the cozy confines of their wood-paneled boardroom in the Student Center and braved the wilds of Heber City to visit the Wasatch Campus. Safe from the prying eyes of reporters from the local rags Trustees and various VPs were free to speak their minds without fear that it would end upon the front page the next day. And while you can find the planned agenda for this meeting on the Board of Trustees website you won't find any record of the actual minutes there. By the way, minutes from that meeting do exist, board members voted to approve the minutes from that meeting the following month, but for some reason they don't appear on the website.


After a few procedural votes, Bill Sederburg dispensed with the usual format and broke the participants up into several small groups to spitball ideas of where they thought the school would be headed in 5 years.

After 15 minutes or so, the groups reconvened and shared their ideas, with Big Bill writing the ideas on a giant whiteboard. Of course the idea of becoming a university was batted around by a few (most thinking it was still much further off in the horizon). When it came time to talk about the future of the Trades program, there were several participants that spoke of the Mountainlands Applied Technology Center and their expanding role in trades training. That is when VP Cory Duckworth spoke up and said "Maybe it is time we start discussing dissolving Trades?" The room went quiet, but nobody disagreed. The genie was out of the bottle

Since that time Trades at UVSC has seen a drop in enrollment, real estate, and relevance. In 2005 the School of Technology, Trades, and Industry was rolled in with the computer science and engineering crowd to form the School of Computing, Engineering and Technology. There has been a steady push by administration to push trades in a far more technical direction and bring their curriculum up to university standards. Old-timers in the Trades have fought the transition tooth and nail, and meanwhile enrollments at the much-cheaper MATC grew.

Which leads us to an article in this morning's Tribune that puts a new spin on the decline of trades:

Union between colleges studied:
Students would be able to earn applied science degree through the curricula at two schools (Salt Lake Tribune, July 18th 2007).

The article says their is a proposal on the table that would allow Utah College of Applied Technology school's to offer Associate of Applied Science degrees in cooperation with colleges and universities throughout the state. Currently UCAT schools, like the MATC, only offer Associate of Applied Technology degrees, which are only recognized within Utah. AAS degrees are a more universal standard, recognized by most states.

For many in the UVSC administration the fact that trades students could only get AAS degrees from them and not from MATC, was the difference that kept the program afloat. After all, why would students interested in an AAS degree go to UVSC when they could get the same degree from MATC for a fraction of the price?

Of course this proposal by UCAT is still in the preliminary stages, but if this happens it could be the beginning of the end for trades at UVSC.


UPDATE: An article in the Trib points out some of the advantages of choosing an applied technology degree over traditional higher education:

Nontraditional path to educational certificates paying off for many Utahns (Salt Lake Tribune, July 30 2007)

New residency rules in effect

The following was included in a campus bulletin that was e-mailed out to employees this morning:


The new Residency rule (R-512) will go into effect on July 1, 2007. This rule requires 1) residing in Utah for 12 continuous months, and, 2) being Financially Independent (student is not claimed on a tax return of any person who is not a resident of Utah, beginning in at least the 2007 tax year.)

There will be NO RETROACTIVE application of the 12-month waiting period. This means the rule goes into effect on July 1 of 2007 and the earliest a new, non-resident student may obtain residency will be July 1, 2008.

A student who has been attending school under the 2006-2007 law, may still obtain resident status upon completion of 60 credits or upon submitting documentation of maintaining continuous residency in Utah for 3 years, regardless of credit earned. Objective evidence demonstrating domicile in Utah must also be submitted with a residency application (ie Utah drivers license, car registration, etc.).

Residency application deadline for Fall semester is August 1, 2007. Applications are available at One Stop (BA 106) or by printing a form from the Admissions web site.
Please refer residency questions to Anne Morrey at extension 8464 or through e-mail at morreyan@uvsc.edu.

This change is significant and will no doubt alter enrollments at UVSC for the foreseeable future. According to the latest data, out-of-state enrollment has stayed fairly flat for the past 4 years. Of course leading the list of states that send their kids off to UVSC is California , and now that it only takes a year to establish residency look for kids from the Golden State to rush back to UVSC.

UVSC Nursing Grads Best at State Boards

According to an article in today's Herald UVSC's Nursing program is pumping out RNs who can pass the state boards at a higher percentage than any other school in the state, with an amazing 94% pass rate.

This makes a few things abundantly clear; (1) UVSC's reputation of having the best nursing program in the state is well-deserved, (2) The school is able to do this despite having the lowest state funding percentage of any school in the state, (3) If Utah is serious about addressing the need for more nurses in the future they would be wise to invest more heavliy in UVSC.

Currently the program can only accept 60 students a year. While this does keep the caliber of students high it also means that there is tremendous room for growth in this sector. The School of Science in Health needs a larger space, even bigger than the proposed expansion to the Pope Science Building, and the state needs to recognize UVSC's contribution to this very important field and increase one-time facility dollars as well as more on-going faculty and staff money.

All students would benefit from a more robust science experience while at UVSC. The school is making the right decision to focus more in this area. It would make sense for the state to step in and encourage UVSC to reach even further.

The Numbers Game

For the past few years the actual number of students at UVSC has been something of a mystery. While the school's Institutional Research office keeps enrollment data handy on their website, it is sometimes not up-to-date. Why does the simple task of counting heads give us such a hazy picture? And what could be the reasons behind cooking the books when it comes to enrollment data.

In fact, up until about a week ago the numbers for the Fall 2006 semester were not available on the website. And these were numbers due in mid-September (The precious "3rd week" enrollment numbers). But a check by The Pipeline at the beginning of 2007 revealed that the numbers had not been updated. If you view the source data for the Fall 2006 page you will see that it was last updated on January 10 2007. We can only assume that the numbers for Fall 2006 were finally updated at that time. Keep in mind that these numbers are not the headcount at the end of finals...they represent the headcount for the third week of classes, when people have set their schedules and are attending class.

Now of course data had been released to the public earlier than that. A story in the Des News from this past October said the college had 20,262 students currently enrolled in at least one class. The 3rd week numbers on the website give a different total: 23,305. Where did those 3,043 students come from? We'll get to that in a minute.

The other thing that is interesting about this discrepancy is that the D News story says that UVSC was one of the few schools that actually had enrollments rise over the previous year, claiming that Fall of 2005 saw 19,836 students attending the school. The article even went so far as to say that the school was "relishing" in their 1 percent increase. But this Fall 2005 number of 19,836 is quite a bit different from the numbers posted by Institutional Research office for the same time period. Their third week total for Fall 2005 is 24,487. So instead of an increase in total enrollment from 2005's 19,836 to 2006's 20,262 we see it going from 24,487 in 2005 to 23,305 in 2006. That's an almost 1,200 student decrease. Not a 1 percent increase...a 5 percent decrease!

So why the funny numbers? Well, what makes these equations so messy sometimes is that on occasion it isn't UVSC students they are counting at all. Sometimes the school posts numbers that include the thousands of Utah teens taking concurrent enrollment courses at their local high school, getting UVSC credit for classes taught by your average secondary-ed teacher. (classes that other schools do not recognize as college level coursework and will not use as transfer credits).

Another scary feature of the concurrent enrollment program: These students are not in special classes, they are mixed in with students who are taking the same course just not for UVSC credit.

Most of the classes are taught on high school campuses by high school teachers who must have a master's degree, Sederburg said. Many are mixed classes, meaning some students are seeking college credit, and others are not. "Right now, the huge percentage of our enrollment is in mixed classes where there are relatively few students taking the course for college credit. In many of those cases, no additional work is being required of the student. We want to move toward the majority of the students taking them for college-level credit and that the teaching is a college-teaching level and not a high-school level." From the Feb 27, 2006 Daily Herald.

So how many of the 24,487 UVSC students in the Fall of 2005 were actually high schoolers getting UVSC credit? Well a Daily Herald story from this past August said that in 2005 there 6,558 students enrolled in the school's concurrent enrollment program. If these teens are indeed counted in the total enrollment numbers, and another Herald article says that is the case (The school claims that the drop from 24,487 to 23,305 as noted above was due to changes in the concurrent enrollment policies), then at least back in 2005 one out of every four UVSC students was actually a high school student.

And these high school students paid a one-time fee of $30 to enroll in the program (it has since been raised to a whopping $35). During 2005 these 6,558 took 46,324 credit hours...meaning on average they took around 7 credit hours each. If you were to take 7 credit hours as a normal student at UVSC it would cost you around $800 (and another $200 in student fees). Do the math and you'll see that UVSC is missing out about 6.5 million dollars, by letting high school kids take their credits at high school. Last year Sederburg asked the legislature to allow UVSC to charge high school students 30 dollars a credit hour. At the time it cost the school about $60 a credit hour and the state was only picking up half of that ($35). That means the 46,324 credit hours attempted in 2005 actually cost the school about $1.5 million. By the way...the state legislature said no to that plan.

So not only does the school miss out on charging these kids full price, but it costs them money to lose this money. No wonder business people look at colleges and scratch their heads.

But of course the most important numbers are the FTEs: The Full-Time Equivalents. This number is reached by combining part time students to equal the hours taken by their full-time peers. It is this number that is used by the state to calculate UVSC's funding. A drop in FTE means less money to go around.

So the FTE numbers should be iron-clad, and they should show that UVSC is increasing enrollment, right? Depends on which numbers you look at. Back in October The Daily Herald ran this story that said that the Fall 2006 FTE number was 13,877, which was a slight raise from 2005's FTE which was 13,739.

Of course the numbers on the Institutional Research site tell quite a different story. Those numbers say that in the Fall of 2005 UVSC had 16,081 FTEs. And this year the school has 15,668 Full-Time Equivalents. That is a difference of -413 or 2.5 percent. Not the growth that has been bragged about in the papers, and certainly not the growth that is being talked about on the hill right now.

Of course The Pipeline admits that the numbers discussed here are only as good as the information provided. If the school has other numbers we would love to see them. If the school would like to share exactly how many high school students are being used to bolster total headcounts, we are all ears.

This much is for sure...The school often throws around that 24,000 number, so often that it is just taken for granted. But the truth is the school has no where near that many students, and it never did. To say otherwise does students, parents, and the state of Utah an injustice. Honesty is the best policy.