UW targets community college students to stymie falling enrollment
Facing a steep enrollment decline and armed with a $1.5 million emergency appropriation, university recruiters aim to convince transfer students that UW beats their local alternative.
University of Wyoming leadership hopes that recruiting in-state transfer students could boost the university’s worrying enrollment figures.
Enrollment at the University of Wyoming has dropped 11 percent since 2018, and UW administrators are scrambling to turn that trend around. In July and August, UW leadership planned, proposed and ultimately approved a $1.5 million cash injection to immediately bolster recruitment efforts. Administrators told trustees this month they started spending that money just days after it was awarded — and were already starting to see results.
“We were able to get into the market two days after you made those funds available,” Vice Provost for Enrollment Management Kyle Moore said, speaking during the trustees’ meeting Thursday. “And since then, while it's still early, we are already seeing dividends — both in the total number of applications, but also the total number of applicants as of this same time last year. And so we're off to a really, really good start.”
Aiming to stabilize or improve UW’s enrollment, administrators and trustees alike are looking to Wyoming’s network of community colleges as a source of prospective students — a source that is currently underutilized and ripe for more intense recruitment.
The ins and outs of UW’s declining enrollment
In 2018, the University of Wyoming served almost 12,500 students; today, UW is home to fewer than 11,000.
Nationwide, colleges and universities took a hit during the pandemic and have not recovered, even as the pandemic has let up. Rising tuition costs and cultural shifts have made college degrees less valuable in the eyes of many young adults and their families. And at UW specifically, recent high-profile lawsuits have focused national media on the institution — and not always in flattering ways.
“This is a multi-faceted situation that we're facing,” Vice Provost Moore told the UW Board of Trustees last week.
The five-year 11 percent drop in overall enrollment hides a number of more detailed statistics. For example, first-time enrollment (mostly first-year students) actually went up last year by 9 percent, before dropping this year by 10 percent — fluctuating year after year by several hundred students.
It also hides what’s happening with transfer students.
As Moore highlighted in his presentation to the board, the transfer student headcount is up significantly this year — 858 students compared to last year’s 790.
That’s an almost 9 percent bump, which could be cause for celebration. But even a 9 percent bump can’t undo the damage of recent years. The transfer student headcount dropped 6 percent in 2021 and another 9 percent in 2022 before going back up this year.
Across the board, the big picture is one of falling enrollment. But UW administrators are hoping transfer students will play a role in turning these figures around.
Where are transfer students going?
As the state’s only four-year public university, UW draws a respectable amount — more than 7 percent — of its total headcount from transfer students.
Transfers are students coming from another school, usually the community college where they earned a two-year associate’s degree. The vast majority of UW’s transfers come from in-state colleges, which are located around the state and typically named for the region they serve (e.g. Northwest College for the counties nearest Yellowstone and Eastern Wyoming College for the counties bordering South Dakota and Nebraska.)
Some UW trustees recently met with community college officials to hammer out new ways their respective institutions could collaborate. UW Trustees Chairman John McKinley said that included strategies for convincing more community college students to pursue their four-year degree at UW.
“Even though Wyoming was their top choice by number, it was less than 50 percent,” McKinley told his fellow trustees during their meeting last week. “(We’re) capturing less than 50 percent of those community college transfer students … What are we doing that we need to improve to attract a larger percentage of those transfer students from in-state — to at least be above 50 percent, to move that number up?”
Anecdotally, some students choose cheaper online colleges, while others choose more prestigious out-of-state universities. But those are not the most common routes, according to Wyoming Community College Commission Deputy Director Ben Mortiz.
He said it’s far more common for Northwest College students in Powell to continue their studies in Montana, just as it’s far more common for Gillette College students to continue their studies in South Dakota. All around the state, students are choosing to stay “local,” even if that means crossing state lines.
“It’s the places that are slightly closer than Laramie,” Moritz said.
The University of Wyoming itself benefits from this dynamic when students in Fort Collins or other northern Colorado locations view Laramie as a “local” option. But out-of-state tuition at UW has increased in recent years, and that “local” option has potentially lost some of its gleam for students south of the state border.
Moore suggested treating potential students from Colorado as distinct from the larger category of “out-of-state” students.
“For a long time, ‘local’ included the University of Wyoming because of the price point,” he said. “And so we have to take that into account. Does our price point, relative to that area, become a factor for the decisions those students are making?”
Moore added his office has not done that analysis yet, but plans to.
“Destroying regional alliances”
Vice Provost Moore said he will return to the trustees in November with a more thorough report on his office’s current and planned recruitment efforts.
The $1.5 million cash injection will not be the end of the trustees’ efforts to turn around UW’s enrollment figures. But Trustee Kermit Brown said some of that money ought to be spent peeling transfer students away from those out-of-state options.
“Can some of that be focused toward the community colleges in such a way that we raise our profile with those potential transferees?” he said. “And maybe destroy some of the regional alliances that we're hearing about and get ourselves on an even footing with those students when they're considering where they're going to go?”
UW is mandated by state law to make its tuition as affordable as possible and Brown said this might put the idea in potential students’ heads that other schools are better than UW — solely because their tuition rates are steeper. Brown pondered how the university could address that perception and make itself more appealing to students looking for a prestigious school.
“That part is driving me crazy,” he said. “And I don't know how you attack the problem.”
Moritz, the deputy director of the state’s community college commission, said answering that question probably requires rigorous surveys and studies. But he said his “preliminary impression” is that strong relationships between faculty at the community college and faculty at the nearby university — especially within disciplines — pave the way for student transfers.
“That relationship translates to very high levels of articulation and transfer,” Mortiz said. “Those areas where the faculty and the departments don't communicate as much, there tends to be a lower rate of transfer.”
In addition to strong faculty relationships, UW is investigating the possibility of a “co-enrollment” model. UW President Ed Seidel said this would prepare community college students for university enrollment down the road, establishing a relationship with them far earlier than UW currently does.
“So if a student enters one of the community colleges with the anticipation from the very beginning that they will transfer to the university, we are working on formalizing that process, then looking at what we would need to do to support that from our side,” he said.
The trustees will likely continue looking at ways to boost recruitment of transfers, and all other students, after they receive Moore’s report in November. For now, recruiters are putting the fresh $1.5 million appropriation to use.
“Last year was the first time we actually did a digital campaign focused on transfer students,” said Chad Baldwin, UW’s chief of institutional communications. “The numbers were positive. So we're doing it again this year in a bigger way with the additional resources provided.”