University plans effort to halt rising enrollment, tuition
After two freshman classes that shattered enrollment records, USC officials promise next year’s freshman class won’t swell anymore.
“We’ve grown to the point where we need to,” President Harris Pastides said. “I can assure the students they won’t see a bump in the size of the freshman class.
Pastides said the size of the class will closely mirror the class of 2011 — which saw a record 4,550 students enroll. Enrollment in 2010 was 4,468 according to the university.
But 2011’s record class is about 16 percent higher than 2009, when 3,920 students enrolled at USC and about 19 percent higher than 2006, when about 3,700 students enrolled. Nevertheless, Pastides said rapidly growing the university “was the right thing to do.”
Along the way, there were some serious growing pains. Freshmen students were forced to sleep in converted study rooms or with resident mentors. Upperclassmen faced worse odds at scoring on-campus housing.
Students complained of added parking woes and longer lines at dining facilities. And the university’s faculty-to-student ratio is now among the highest in the SEC at 19 members to every student.
Ten years ago, that ratio was 17 students to every faculty member, according to data on the provost’s website. That ranking, which factors largely into a university’s overall ranking by U.S. News and World Report and others, is seen as one measure of a university’s commitment to faculty student interaction and personal learning.
“In my own talking to students and parents on Parents Weekend and faculty and others, I heard from them, now it’s time to reinvest in the infrastructure, particularly the student infrastructure,” Pastides said.
The president said the university would make a concerted effort to boost its student support services, including “everything from more career counseling to the percentage of students who can live on campus to language instructors to intramural fields to Greek Life,” Pastides said.
The added tuition dollars lessened tuition increases in a time of decreased state funding, Pastides said. Those dollars also will fund several new initiatives — including improvements in the law school, the faculty replenishment program and capital building and renovation projects, according to USC officials.
“It is true that tuition increases on the current students were not higher because we did admit more students,” Pastides said.
Enacting the edict and ensuring the class isn’t larger is somewhat tricky for the university’s admissions staff, said Mary Wagner, senior associate director of admissions. USC will likely receive more than 20,000 applicants for the incoming class. Then, it must decide how many are offered admission. That number was about 13,000 in 2011, she said.
Of those, there is no way to know exactly how many will be accepted. USC keeps historical figures and attempts its best calculations, Wagner said, but the “yield rate,” the amount of students who show up on campus for class might vary,.
Keeping the current rate will mean offering admission to approximately the same number of students, Wagner said.
This article has been corrected to reflect USC's accurate faculty to student ratio.