Enrollment at Northern Illinois University this fall is down just about a half percent from last fall and the number of new freshmen decreased. WNIJ education reporter Peter Medlin talked with NIU VP for Enrollment Management, Marketing, & Communications Sol Jensen about the enrollment trends they’re seeing.
Peter Medlin (PM): Obviously, new students matter. But it’s just as important to keep the students you already have. I saw that the retention rate for continuing undergrads is the highest it's been in almost a decade now. I'm curious, what are some of the big contributors to that success?
Sol Jensen (SJ): It starts really when a student is admitted all the way transitioning them through the first year—making sure that they feel that sense of belonging, that they're highly engaged with current students, with faculty and staff advisors, and also making sure that they have all the resources that they need to be successful. I think one of the great examples that we continue to build upon every year is program that we have internally called Navigate. This is a way for us to connect the dots between various offices to make sure that we are serving all students in the best way possible and making appropriate referrals.
PM: Another reason that enrollment stayed pretty steady this year is you had an over 10% increase in new transfer students. Can you talk a little bit about that?
SJ: Yeah, and this is really building on some of the successes we had last year as well. Last year, we had a 6% increase. This year, over 10%. We've been very intentional with our work with transfer students and, more particularly, the various partnerships that we have with some of our top community college partners: being able to create seamless transitions where students are able to enroll at NIU, we have opportunities to educate students in those community colleges but they're NIU students. We're super excited about how those have been growing.
PM: One of the things you mentioned in the news release was that this year's nationwide FAFSA fiasco, the delays and the complications there could have had played a role in the lower number of freshmen. Can you talk a little bit about that and why, specifically, NIU could have felt those effects more than other institutions did?
SJ: It has not impacted all institutions the same. The research has shown us nationally, students, especially who come from under-served communities, areas -- they don't have the same kind of resources. They don't have individuals to help them. They may be first in their family, and so their parents or family members also don't have a lot to provide and support. And, quite frankly, the issues with the FAFSA lasted so long that, at some point, students were out of school and now they no longer had anybody at the schools to really assist them. So, it absolutely impacted our ability to enroll many of them for this year. I will say that, believing that many of them may not have chosen to go to college, we're going to continue to reach out to them.
But we have seen an overall 9% decrease in FAFSA completions compared to last year. And when you look at our freshman class alone, it's a decrease of 11%. So, it is a considerable number of fewer students that have completed the FAFSA this year compared to last year, and we believe that's absolutely having an impact.
PM: One of the last questions I always like to ask is: what's something about these overall enrollment trends that you just think is more important than people might realize when they just glance and see the headline?
SJ: There's been a lot of great work, as well, bringing in a great class for our graduate students. Our law school is at one of its highest enrollments in over a decade. We are seeing some significant growth there as well in graduate, professional, & law students. So, we're excited about those numbers and the trend there as well.
