“Better, not bigger,” is George Washington University President Thomas LeBlanc’s new mantra for now. After seeing consecutive years of increased enrollment, LeBlanc wants to cut the size of the undergraduate class by 20 percent over the next five years.
“During the past five years, we have grown our undergraduate student body significantly,” LeBlanc wrote in an open letter. “We have stretched our facilities, our services, our staff and our faculty to accommodate that growth. Now, we need to right-size the undergraduate student population by reducing it.”
While details on the planned reduction are still scarce, it could be a way of protecting the institution going forward. Nathan Grawe is a professor of economics at Carleton College in Minnesota. He has done extensive research on higher education enrollment, and he says relying on continuous enrollment growth can be risky.
“We have seen institutions facing smaller enrollments, especially in the northeast simply because of the declining number of prospective students,” Grawe says. “While some institutions have just found themselves wondering into declining enrollments, it seems that what may be a little unique here is that George Washington is looking forward — making a more deliberate choice and doing this in a more methodical way.”
Grawe’s research has focused on drops in the birth rate over the last two decades and how those numbers will lead to a drop in the number of students going to college.
Nationwide, undergraduate student enrollment fell 7 percent between 2010 and 2017, according to statistics from the National Center for Education. The drop has led some schools to conduct extreme outreach activities like hiring companies to recruit students from overseas to fill the gap.
Some universities have answered declining enrollment with higher tuition. But George Washington University already has the highest undergraduate tuition in the D.C. area, running at over $55,000 an academic year for a full-time student. (Georgetown University’s tuition is close on its heels).
Decreasing enrollment would also mean accepting fewer students, giving GW the appearance of being more selective. The university currently accepts about 40 percent of the students who apply to its undergraduate programs. In comparison, Georgetown accepted about 15 percent of applicants out of its latest pool. New York University, which previously accepted about 35 percent of applicants, decreased their acceptance rate to 16 percent for their latest class.
GW did not make LeBlanc available for an interview, and school officials told WAMU they don’t know how the decrease in enrollment will affect things like scholarships or tuition rates. They say these are conversations they plan to have with faculty and staff before developing a detailed strategy.
“A critical area of focus will be elevating the quality of our undergraduate student experience,” LeBlanc wrote in a statement to WAMU. “The goal is to ensure that our students have an outstanding experience at GW. How we achieve this goal will be the work before us this fall.”
In addition to cutting enrollment, the president says the university plans to increase investments in teaching science, technology, engineering and math — known as STEM subjects. Currently, most students at the university earn their degrees in social sciences.
This story first appeared on WAMU.
