THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, June 4, 1996 TAG: 9606040353
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 71 lines
Norfolk State University faced the biggest enrollment decline of Virginia's state-supported four-year schools last fall, says a state report released Monday.
NSU's enrollment dropped 6.2 percent, from 8,667 in the fall of 1995 to 8,129 last fall, according to the report, from the State Council of Higher Education.
But in terms of total credit hours, Norfolk State's enrollment hardly dropped at all.
The state calculates ``full-time equivalent,'' or FTE, enrollment by totaling all credit hours logged at a college and determining how many full-time students that would make up. Using that measure, Norfolk State declined less than 1 percent, from 7,618 to 7,586.
State officials explained the variance in numbers this way: Nearly all the students Norfolk State lost last fall were not full-time students, but part-timers, who take only a course or two. That's why the FTE total - which is used to determine funding - hardly changed.
And that means that the overall enrollment decline isn't a major problem, Virginia and Norfolk State officials said Monday.
The drop ``wasn't that serious because it didn't affect the FTE (statistics) as much,'' said Maxine Allen, NSU's associate vice president for academic affairs and director of institutional research.
Most of the decline resulted from a decision by some local school systems to drop contracts with NSU to provide recertification courses for teachers, Allen said. ``With the budget problems the school systems were having, they were unable to fund those activities,'' she said.
Allen said she did not have a list of all the school systems that had dropped the contracts, but they included Virginia Beach.
Total enrollment at Virginia's state-supported four-year and two-year colleges held steady, at 293,000. George Mason University registered the biggest gain - an 11.0 percent jump, from 21,774 to 24,172. ODU ranked third, behind James Madison University, with a 3.6 percent increase, from 16,490 to 17,077.
In terms of full-time equivalent students, George Mason also came out on top, with a 5.3 percent increase. Old Dominion was second, at 4.6 percent.
Also during its meeting, the state council:
Approved six ``performance measures'' by which to track the state's colleges. They will be: graduation rates, transfer rates, employment and satisfaction rates of alumni, percentage of budget used for instruction, percentage of state management standards met, and the percentage of time classrooms are used.
In the next year, each college will be asked to collect the data and determine goals for future years. The targets will vary from school to school. The schools' progress in meeting those goals could affect their state funding, said state budget director Robert W. Lauterberg, who is coordinating the project with the state council.
Lauterberg said officials are also working on a seventh indicator - measuring the sensitive subject of faculty productivity - but that hasn't been ironed out.
Learned that tuition and fees for in-state undergraduates at four-year schools will go up just 1.3 percent in the fall, the smallest increase this decade. The annual average in Virginia is increasing from $3,949 to $4,002.
During the winter, Allen and the General Assembly approved a two-year tuition freeze for undergraduates from Virginia. The freeze, however, does not apply to fees such as student activity charges.
By reining in charges, the state should drop next year in nationwide rankings of college costs, said Dan Hix, the state council's senior finance coordinator: Virginia should fall from the eighth to 11th most expensive state for major research universities and from second to sixth for other universities.
KEYWORDS: COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES VIRGINIA
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