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Fall enrollment numbers on track despite difficult year for NIU
Though NIU has endured a difficult year - starting with the flooding in August 2007, the first bomb threat in December 2007, the Feb. 14 shootings and the bomb threat on April 18 - enrollment numbers for the summer and fall semesters are right on target.
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
“After the year NIU had, there were rumors going around that [the Feb. 14 shootings] would either help or hurt enrollment,” said Assistant Vice Provost of Enrollment Services Brent Gage. “But I don’t hear much about it at NIU.”
Parents going through orientation weren’t worried either.
“The [shootings] didn’t influence my decision,” said Barb Jenkins, mother of incoming freshman Amelia Jenkins. “My older daughter goes here, and it seemed to bring the students closer together.”
Another parent, Sonequa Strong, who’s daughter Ashley Strong will be a freshman in the fall, wasn’t worried either.
“At first [the shootings] did influence my decision. I didn’t want my daughter to come here,” Strong said. “But we talked about it, and realized it could happen anywhere. Ashley really wanted to come here, so here we are.”
TYPICAL ENROLLMENT PATTERNS
In the fall of 2006, there were 25,313 students enrolled at NIU, according to an article in the Northern Star. This is the largest number of students enrolled at NIU since 1987, when 25,455 students were enrolled here, according to the NIU data book.
Summer semesters are a little different though.
Typically, there are approximately 9,000 students enrolled in summer classes, however, this summer semester there are approximately 200 fewer students enrolled in classes than last summer. According to Gage, though, this number is pretty normal.
“Students pick summer classes based on what they need, what’s being offered, what professors are teaching and what their summer plans are,” Gage said.
“This is business as usual,” Gage said.
Though it’s still too early to tell precisely how many students will be attending classes this fall, Gage thinks that NIU is in pretty good shape to meet its goal of approximately 25,000 students.
One way NIU predicts how many students will be attending classes is through enrollment confirmation - which, simply put, is how many students have said they will be at NIU in the fall.
Because NIU does not have an enrollment deposit like some other universities, it is harder to predict how many students will be attending, because, unlike the universities with enrollment deposits, there is no penalty for backing out.
NIU also looks at orientation numbers and housing deposits to help predict how many students will be attending NIU. However, using housing deposits does not always provide all the necessary information, as 14 to 18 percent of students live off-campus, Gage said.
Every fall, NIU looks to have about 5,100 new freshmen and transfer students enroll at NIU, and 60 percent of that number are usually freshmen, Gage said.
Overall though, NIU aims to have 18,000 undergraduate students every fall, and about 25,000 students total (including law and graduate students).
“We build the curriculum accordingly. We try to have enough gen. eds and upper-level courses to accommodate all the students’ needs,” Gage said.
“This has been an incredibly difficult year, and there are a lot of variables,” Gage said. “When the provost asks how we’re doing, I tell him ‘It’s like comparing apples to bananas’ because we’ve gone past oranges.”