Goodman told senators that for the second year in a row, UB failed to meet its enrollment targets last fall. "The problem is more a retention problem than it is a recruitment problem," he noted, pointing out that although UB enrolled more freshmen than targeted, it "did not come close to the continuing undergraduate target," falling short by 260 students.

Since UB missed its enrollment targets two years in a row, Goodman said the university has set "more modest targets" for Fall 1998 that are close to the enrollment figures for this year.

Goodman presented senators with preliminary headcount figures for the spring semester that showed the decline is continuing from the fall.

Applications for the Fall 1998 semester continue the downward trend, he noted, with freshman applications as of Feb. 1 down 5.5 percent from last year and 7.5 percent from two years ago. Total undergraduate applications were down by 7.1 percent from last year and 11.5 percent from Fall 1996

Goodman urged faculty members to convey that message to their colleagues. "We need everybody to know that (there is an enrollment problem)," he said, describing a situation in which he recently found a senior UB faculty member to be totally unaware of any enrollment problem. Enrollment must become a "high priority for faculty and staff," he added.

He pointed to several new initiatives by the Admissions Office, which, he said, must take a "more proactive, more aggressive and more modern" approach to recruiting applicants.

The office, which has been working with the enrollment-management consulting firm of Noel-Levitz, is making more direct-mail contacts with prospective students. It also is conducting telemarketing using a computer program called Forecast Plus to identify and personally call prospective students who are considered more likely to enroll at UB.

To improve retention, the university will be doing some block registration of incoming freshmen-enrolling a small group of students in the same sections of required courses-"so they see each other and get to know each other" and hopefully stay at UB beyond the first semester or year, Goodman said. When possible, this block registration will be combined with a section of "UB 101," a course offered to new students to help them to get to know the university.

"UB 101," which has been available to students for years on a small scale, now will be offered on a much larger scale, he said.

UB also is using the Retention Management System, a questionnaire that identifies "non-cognitive" factors, such as family problems, financial issues, lack of study skills or lack of social skills, that may contribute to poor academic performance. "That we can use for aggressive intervention," Goodman said.

He added that UB is "being much more modern" in its use of technology to communicate with students, pointing to SOAR-Student On-line Access to Records-a World Wide Web-based way students can get their grades and schedules, and Webmail, another on-line method of communicating with students.

Greiner told senators that Goodman's aggregate data must be put into several contexts:

- UB, he said, has seen an increase of almost 20 percent in applications in Western New York over the past five years, with a "good" yield. However, Western New York students make up a relatively small part-about 20 percent-of the total enrollment. There has been a consistent, slow decline in the number of applications, coupled with low yield, from downstate.

"We suffer from one disadvantage: location, location, location," Greiner said, noting that UB is located almost as far away from the population center of the state as one can get. Many of the students UB would like to attract live downstate and "we have not yet found a way to effectively penetrate that market."

UB also is hindered by the centralized SUNY application process, he said, noting that one of the first and most effective contacts an institution can make with a student is the application. The SUNY application, Greiner said, "homogenizes UB and takes away from us our advantage, which is the breadth and uniqueness of our programs."

· UB is moving to recruit more undergraduates from out-of-state and internationally.

· Increase in cost. In the past, UB was the only SUNY center located in a major metropolitan area that had a substantial part-time enrollment. With increases in tuition in recent years and intense local competition, "we've seen the bottom drop out" of part-time student enrollment, Greiner said.

· Some schools are having few problems with enrollment, while others, such as engineering and education, are experiencing serious declines. But the latter are aware of the problem and are working hard to correct it, he said, calling enrollment declines such as those experienced by engineering a "cyclical phenomenon."