Fall enrollment down 3.39 percent at Wichita State

Wichita State University announced Friday that fall enrollment is down 3.39 percent.

At WSU, 508 fewer students enrolled this fall than in 2014, part of a “downward trend” for all Board of Regents universities, WSU Provost Tony Vizzini said in a news conference Friday afternoon.

Vizzini said enrollment figures are bound to fluctuate.

“Basically in the last three years we’re about where we’ve always been,” he said.

In July, The Eagle reported that WSU has spent nearly $2 million on an out-of-state recruitment firm, mailings and lists of student names since 2013 to boost enrollment numbers.

Vizzini said Royall, the out-of-state firm, has been “a great partner” for the university.

“Royall has been instrumental up to this stage for increasing the number of applicants from regions that are harder for us to get to,” Vizzini said.

While the university has done “very well with retention of students in the state of Kansas,” Vizzini said it is looking to attract people from all backgrounds.

“We’re always trying to look for more markets to enroll students. It’s not just the traditional high-schooler – it is the returning adult, it is the individual who is out there who needs adult education to advance in their career,” he said.

In an effort to accomplish that, WSU is trying to recruit more students from surrounding states. The university will start offering tuition to Oklahoma and Texas students at 1 1/2 times in-state rates.

The university is looking into offering in-state tuition rates to students from the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metropolitan areas, he said.

The university has had a similar agreement with other Midwestern states like Missouri and Nebraska for years. Adding two states connected to Kansas along the I-35 corridor “makes perfect sense,” he said.

“If you recognize how much transit goes through the I-35 corridor, what you recognize is there are a lot of opportunities for business transactions with our friends in Texas and Oklahoma,” Vizzini said. “If you bring people up to Kansas to educate them, there’s a likelihood they’ll stay in Kansas. If they go back to Oklahoma and they develop business relationships with our faculty and our researchers, that’s a bonus for us.”

He blamed the Regents-wide decrease in enrollment on declining numbers of Kansas high school graduations.

“Now KU, K-State and ourselves, we’re very much looking for out-of-state students,” Vizzini said. “We’re seeing an increase in the number of out-of-state students. We see that as a good thing. It diversifies our environment.”

This story was originally published September 25, 2015 at 3:34 PM with the headline "Fall enrollment down 3.39 percent at Wichita State."