FAYETTEVILLE — Fewer high school graduates in the years ahead means the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville must adopt strategies for maintaining student enrollment, Chancellor Joe Steinmetz said Tuesday.
"Financial models that are built on student growth are simply not sustainable, and, I submit, simply not wise," Steinmetz said in his annual all-campus talk.
This fall, UA's enrollment slid less than 1% to 27,559 students, with most other four-year universities in the state also experiencing year-over-year declines based on preliminary state data.
Notably for UA, the dip ended more than a decade of yearly enrollment growth built largely on recruitment of out-of-state students. Steinmetz said UA nationally had been the fastest-growing "flagship" university from 2007-2016.
But he described an expectation that the population of students exiting high school will flatten, then, after 2025, begin a sharp decline. For the state, a percentage decline of 30% or more is predicted by some when it comes to the number of college-going students in 2029 compared to 2017, Steinmetz said.
"It's easy to see, that this will have a profound impact on our budgeting. We have lived off additional tuition revenue that has come with steadily increasing student body numbers over the last 10 years," Steinmetz said.
He said UA will remain committed to its approximately 50-50 split for out-of-state and in-state undergraduate students, and called the university's student totals this year "likely the new norm, an enrollment fluctuating somewhere between 27,500 and perhaps 28,000 students."
Steinmetz said emphasizing the importance of college and a recent boost in scholarship dollars for community college transfer students are part of UA's plans to ensure steady enrollment.