According to official "10th day" numbers (10th day of classes...the "official" numbers that they use every semester for enrollment), Fall 2006 (our high point in the last 15 or so years) we had 13,602 total students and Fall 2015 we had 11,094, a decrease of 18.4%. It's entirely likely that we're down again this spring, due to questions about state finances. Hopefully all the advertising that we've been doing as well as the 3% tuition decrease for new students will help bring that back up somewhat. They haven't released the numbers for this spring, but I know that they're down as compared to last year. Spring to Spring in the last 10 years, the decrease is more like 19%.wiu712 wrote:In a Feb 3 "Western Courier" article, it was mentioned that the university is facing a 25 percent decrease in student enrollment since 2006.
http://westerncourier.com/34445/news/bi ... esses-sga/
That is a sizeable decrease in enrollment over the last 10 years.
For comparison, the 10-year span from Fall 2005 to Fall 2015, the change in enrollment for the various state schools goes like this:
UIS - 16.38% (4,517 -> 5,402)
UIC - 13.34% (24,812 -> 28,632)
GSU - 8.98% (5,405 -> 5,938)
SIUE - 5.64% (13,460 -> 14,265)
UIUC - 4.87% (41,938 -> 44,087)
ISU - 2.52% (20,265 -> 20,788)
WIU - -20.82% (13,404 -> 11,094)
NEIU - -22.98% (12,164 -> 9,891)
SIUC - -23.99% (21,441 -> 17,292)
NIU - -25.23% (21,441 -> 17,292)
EIU - -42.36% (12,129 -> 8,520)
CSU - -47.58% (7,035 -> 4,767)...for reference, I was unable to find 2005 for CSU, so numbers are comparing 2006 to 2015 (9-year span)
The total of all students at all Illinois public universities has decreased by just under 11,000 students from 2005 to 2015 (again, using 2006 numbers for CSU, but it's still pretty close to that).
So you can see why CSU and EIU are the ones caught in the "first wave" of significant issues due to huge decreases in enrollment. There's a group of schools all in the 20%-26% decrease range: NIU, SIUC, NEIU, and WIU. Then a few that have seen modest growth: ISU, UIUC, SIUE. And a few that have had pretty decent growth (whether because enrollment wasn't that large to begin with, or because they have actually added a significant amount of students): GSU, UIC, and UIS. UIS and GSU have really only added fewer than 1,000 students in that timeframe, but as a percentage of total enrollment, it's decent growth. UIC has added the most students in that time, with 3,820.
Here's the raw numbers (most taken from each school's Institutional Research and Planning website):
I've added a color scale for each school, the lower the enrollment number, the closer to red it is, the higher the number, the closer to green. So for each school, darkest red is lowest number, darkest green is highest number, so you can kinda see how some schools have steadily increased, some have steadily decreased, and some have somewhat jumped around a bit.
Scott Lawson - Board Admin
