In an enrollment briefing presented to the staff senate, slow growth and expansion was highlighted as the most determining factor of success at the university.
“We’re not trying to be a school of 20,000,” Vice President of Student Affairs, Sara Axelson said during the briefing.
This statement prefaced the findings of the capacity management study, which revealed that with more efficient scheduling the university has the potential to enroll significantly more students.
“We tend to schedule class from Monday through Thursday, from ten to two,” Mary Aguayo, Enrollment and Policy strategist, said, “One of our key findings is that if we were to balance scheduling, we could accommodate 3000 more students.”
Despite the university’s growth possibilities, the group also acknowledged the significant barriers to expansion. The briefing indicated that numerous programs of study are already at capacity.”
“We have the physical capacity, but not the course capacity,” Axelson said.
A counter problem highlighted by the group was the under-enrollment of some colleges. For example, despite a $54 million expansion of the College of Business, it remains one of the most underutilized programs at the university.
“The College of Business is smaller than it should be,” Alyson Hagy, the associate vice president for undergraduate education and budgets, said, “We’re going to be really aggressively recruiting students into it.”
Talks of expansion for the university must inherently factor out-of-state students into the equation. While acknowledging the benefits and quality of students that come from out of state, the group emphasized that enrollment needs to be Wyomingite friendly.
“We don’t want the majority of our student body to be from out of state,” Axelson said.
The group repeatedly emphasized the necessity of slow, measured progress in order to ensure a more even balance of students among all programs, and to prevent many of the major crunches seen today.
“We’re in the business of trying to attract as many students as possible,” Hagy said, “What we’d like to do is not overwhelm ourselves, but keep growing.”
Besides the enrollment briefing, the staff also had first readings of resolutions including a ban on concealed carry on campus and a ban on e-cigarettes. Leadership pushed the senate to vote to veto a second reading on the concealed carry resolution in order to get the resolution to the State Legislature in time to influence the vote, but through a combination of abstentions and votes in negation, the attempt failed.
