Provost Thomas Headrick, recently returned from a forum of the Association of American Universities (AAU), reported that UB is grappling with many of the same issues as its sister institutions. UB's future student profile, Headrick said, will include fewer freshmen but more transfer students; increased combination upper division/graduate coursework opportunities; and perhaps fewer Ph.D. programs in fields that will offer only very limited opportunities for employment after graduation.

Discussing UB's progress toward meeting those goals in fall, 1995, Vice President for Student Affairs Robert Palmer said, "In a strange way we started in one direction and veered off and ended up where we wanted to be in the first place. In February we set a target for the institution to reduce the number of freshmen, to stabilize it around 2,400 or 2,500, and increase the graduate and transfer student areas."

When UB's share of the the 1995-1996 budget was revealed last summer, freshman enrollment targets were necessarily increased and graduate targets decreased. Ultimately, the freshman class numbered 400 more students than targeted, and "Graduate students were up-surprisingly up," said Palmer, "and transfers were about where they should be."

"We had estimated that we'd lose a number of students," Palmer continued. "But when the dust settled, we were about 500 students ahead of where we anticipated, even in March. So that's the good news."

Palmer pointed to five efforts "to make it easier for students to function in this institution," despite the tough budgetary environment. He thanked Provost Headrick and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Nicolas Goodman for helping to improve access to majors, citing the expansion of the popular physical therapy program. Other improvements included the new tuition time payment; a simplified federal financial aid application process; the DARS system, which allows students to automatically consult their transcripts; and "the big one for us," he said, the BIRD (Billing, Inquiry, Registration, and Drop/Add) touch-tone registration system.

Faculty Senate Chair Claude Welch initiated a discussion of how faculty might more actively participate in student recruitment and retention. "Admission is not a passive process in 1995," he noted. "It's something that requires a great deal of interaction with school systems, with individual families, with persons who have a variety of choices as to where they can go for undergraduate and graduate work."

In 1985, the last time the Faculty Senate examined admissions policy, it reinforced a threefold basis for determining whether a freshman applicant is offered admission: GPA, class rank, and standardized test scores.

Presenting the fall '95 student profile, Director of Admissions Kevin Durkin surprised some Senators by including a fourth basis used to determine admission: the academic rigor of the student's high school preparation.

Durkin noted that this additional basis is particularly helpful because 34 percent of New York State high schools no longer report class rank. Many high schools, Durkin noted, find the process of ranking students to be a difficult and time-consuming process that benefits only college admissions offices. Senators Maureen Jameson and Peter Horvath raised concerns about the nebulousness of the concept of rigor; for example: what about the potentially great art student with a beautiful portfolio but poor grades?

Durkin responded, "How is a program in a vocational technical high school, or a BOCES program, different from an academic program, a college-bound program? How is four years of math, four science, and four language different from two years of metal shop, wood shop, or home economics? No slam on those disciplines, so much as I'm saying that within the context of the past we have looked for the very best prepared freshman applicants, and have offered admission to those applicants. It is conceivable that an applicant could have the average, the ranking, and the test, but still not have the rigor."

Durkin presented the fall 1995 student profile to the Senate. "For fall 1995, the Office of Admissions processed over 22,000 undergraduate applications, including more than 17,000 domestic applications, nearly 3,000 EOP, 1,500 international, and 500 Millard Fillmore College applications." The aggregate number of undergraduate applications increased by slightly over 1 percent over 1994; transfers from within SUNY increased by 2 to 3 percent; and transfers from non-SUNY, or private and out-of-state schools, increased by more than 5 percent.

EOP applications declined by about 6 percent from fall,1994, "likely the result of uncertainty over continued funding of the program," Durkin speculated. "Remember the media conjecture that was played out for so long last spring at a critical time in the admissions cycle."

Freshman engineering applications as a proportion of total freshman applications continued to decline since fall 1990, from 17 percent in that year to 11 percent today. "Arts and Sciences applications increased by 3.6 percent," Durkin said. "Management, architecture, and the health sciences were virtually unchanged since 1994."

"Attempting to reach the larger freshman enrollment target from an applicant pool that was pretty much the same as it was a year ago necessitated that a greater proportion of students be accepted from that pool," Durkin explained. "Eighty percent of regular day applicants were admitted this year, compared to 70 percent in fall 1994." The mean high school average for incoming freshmen in fall 1995 was 89.6, compared to 90.2 last year. Their mean recentered SAT scores were: verbal, 561; math, 591; and composite, 1152.

Since the early 1970s, there has been an FSEC resolution to provide for individualized consideration to control for "persons with special abilities but fall below the normal zone of admissions," Welch noted, including athletes, "persons who have had very complex family circumstances, and persons with physical handicaps." Transfer applicants are evaluated solely on the basis of GPAs at previously-attended colleges or universities.

Vice Provost for International Education Stephen Dunnett reported on the state of international student enrollment. According to Dunnett, UB slipped from 25th to 39th place among AAU institutions in terms of international enrollments. Dunnett cited UB's lack of a coordinated international recruitment program and SUNY's budgetary problems, which he said were "widely reported overseas." Even in July, UB could not provide tuition costs to traditional international "feeder schools," so students couldn't make budgetary decisions leading to matriculation. Plus, it takes three months to get a visa, which is granted only upon commitment to attend the university.

Senator Herbert Schuel suggested intensifying efforts to recruit out-of-state students. Not only would they broaden the diversity of the student body, he said, but they would pay higher out-of-state tuition for at least a year. Palmer explained that such a plan wouldn't benefit UB as one might expect. "We don't reap the extra tuition," he said. "It all goes back into the coffers (at Albany)."

Maureen Jameson referred three proposals to the FSEC to help faculty become more involved in recruiting students.The proposals suggest that faculty attending conferences or teaching in other cities make efforts to meet with potential UB applicants; that deans and chairs provide additional travel funds to encourage recruitment by faculty on trips; and that alumni organizations in other cities be asked to facilitate contact between traveling faculty members and potential UB applicants.

In other news, the FSEC plans to take a harder look at the "creditworthiness" of some course offerings, now that the requirement for graduation has been reduced from 128 credits to 120. The Educational Programs and Policy Committee will draft an inventory of courses that might bear further scrutiny, including but not limited to 100-level classes that overlap with high school curricula, remedial courses, athletic courses, 'tutoring for credit,' undergraduate independent study, and undergraduate teaching assistantships.