UB Exceeds Fall Enrollment Targets

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo has exceeded its enrollment targets for full-time students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and has increased its number of graduate students by more than 15 percent since last fall, according to UB's official enrollment-status report.

Based on an enrollment "snapshot" taken Sept. 17, the actual headcount at UB for Fall 1999 totals 24,257 students, 637 students over the 23,620 student target set by SUNY and 887 more students than Fall 1998.

The number of full-time freshmen enrolled is 3,196, or 296 over target, and the total of new full-time graduate students is 1,954, which exceeds the target by 152 students.

"The numbers show an extraordinary improvement at UB over the last few years and it's due to a lot of hard work by a lot of people," said Sean Sullivan, UB vice provost for academic information and planning.

The Fall 1999 enrollment-status report indicated growth in nearly all areas except part-time students, the only group significantly below target at both the undergraduate or graduate levels, which is a trend Sullivan said he has noticed over the past several years. Transfer enrollment also was slightly (10 students) below target, although it has increased since last fall from 1,306 to 1,365.

Retention rates also are up this fall, with 84.2 percent of students returning this year, compared to only 81.7 percent in 1998.

However, the figure that holds the most significance for UB is the dramatic increase in graduate-student enrollment of 291 students over last fall, a number which Sullivan called "tremendous."

He explained that in recent years, enrollment in UB graduate and professional programs decreased dramatically from a steady enrollment around 8,600 throughout the 1980s and early 1990s to only 7,707 in 1998. But with a total of 7,998 students enrolled this fall in graduate and professional programs, Sullivan said that the numbers should climb steadily back to historical levels.

Declining graduate enrollment is a trend nationally among institutions of higher education, making the increase in UB's graduate enrollment more remarkable, he said.

According to Sullivan, a combination of three steps implemented at UB over the past year contributed to this year's high numbers: an integrated-marketing plan in the admissions process; Access99, the computer-access requirement for freshmen, and a new tuition revenue-incentive program.

The Class of 2003 was the first to be recruited by the Office of Admissions since the implementation of an overall, cohesive, fully integrated marketing plan that ties together individual recruitment strategies, many of which had been identified by the enrollment management consulting firm Noel-Levitz. Sullivan said that although new admissions strategies played a large role in the recruitment success, it was not an exclusive one.

UB is being referred to more and more as SUNY's "technology campus," which also has helped in attracting and retaining students, he said, adding that recent surveys completed by this year's freshmen indicate that Access99 played a significant role in their decision to come to UB.

A third contributing factor, said Sullivan, was the "heightened awareness about the importance of enrollment in increasing the budget." Under SUNY's new budget allocation process (BAP), the campus keeps all of its tuition revenue.

"We directly linked enrollment to the budget like we never have before and the deans have really responded to it, especially in the graduate schools," he explained. Based on the new revenue-incentive-based budget model, UB will receive a projected $4.5 million in marginal tuition revenue -- money received from tuition that exceeds the actual cost of educating students -- for the 1999-2000 academic year, which will be distributed among units according to their enrollment figures.

According to the tuition-revenue incentive program, a component of UB's new "all-funds" approach to budgeting, individual units will receive 60 percent of the marginal tuition revenue for each student that meets its target, Sullivan explained. The incentive is that the allocation jumps to 90 percent for each student that exceeds that target figure.

In spite of this year's high enrollments, UB standards have not suffered. Although the mean combined SAT score for this year's freshman class is down slightly, from 1145 to 1137, nearly one-third of the freshmen this year have combined scores above 1,200.

Sullivan noted that while fall enrollments are up in general among most colleges and universities in Western New York, UB's numbers are up more, relative to other institutions.