DULUTH: Good news for colleges around the Twin Ports, new student enrollment is up. For the orientation leaders at University of Minnesota Duluth like Nick Vittorio, it’s finally time to put their plans into action for Bulldog Welcome Week. “This is a dream come true for everyone that is involved on this rock star team which is Orientation leaders,” Vittorio said. The team is welcoming more than two thousand new students this fall, up more than six percent from last year and according to Fernando Delgado, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at the UMD, that’s good news because more students means a bigger budget.
“Anytime we see a drop of enrollment it impacts every part of the institution,” he said. “It impacts first the academic side of the house, because that’s what they’re paying to come here for, but all of our auxiliary areas food, dining residence life that are also negatively impacted.” And it’s that negative impact UMD has been dealing with with recent enrollment drops but Delgado said that seems to be turning around.
“It means that the enrollment drop that we’ve experienced over the last several years, we might be able to right the ship because if enrollment increases in each freshman class in successive class you’ll end up with a positive bubble four or five years from now.” According to Eric Berg, the vice president for enrollment management at the College of St. Scholastica, UMD isn’t the only Twin Ports college that’s seeing an increase in enrollment.
“At this point in time, new enrollment to the main campus which are traditional students look like they’re going to be slightly higher than last year in the one to two percent range up from last year,” he said. But that’s not the whole story. At St. Scholastica, a majority of the students that go here aren’t necessarily the ones you’d find in dorms. “We’re talking about between 2500 and 2600 students that are in our nontraditional programs, graduate extended online programs. We’re seeing growth in those,” Berg said.
But regardless of what the students are doing at the colleges and the strategies the schools are using to draw them in, the colleges agree one outside factor is helping.”There’s an increasing number of high school graduates in Minnesota,” Berg said. “We draw roughly 83 percent of our students from the state so we believe that as the increase in Minnesota high school graduates happens we’ll also see an increase here on campus.” It’s a hopeful sign as the colleges prepare to welcome their newest students this year. Lake Superior College and University of Wisconsin Superior also said they are expecting an increase in new student enrollment this fall.
