UCAFANS.COM | GO UCA BEARS!

From what I am hearing, it seems like most the U of A, UALR, and ASU are all expecting record enrollments this Fall. However, from what I've heard, UCA might have a decrease from last Fall. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? With the extra lottery money available, you would think that enrollment should go up...why isn't it (It may still, but from what I've heard it won't be going up)? It is different if we are being more selective and turning away more students, and if that is the case then fine, but for some reason I just don't think students are applying because UCA is labeled "the most expensive public school in the state."

Who knows...discuss.

Let's see, here's an example:

2010 -2011
UCA tuiton per hour: $174.50
Pulaski Tech tuition per hour: $81.00

If I wanted to take my freshman level and sophomore level courses, up to the associates degree level, and I could save half of the cost by going to a community college and those credits would transfer to UCA, would that be a bad idea in this economy? Heck, most of the Pell grant would cover a full course load and books!

Biology at Pulaski Tech = Biology at UCA....at least in the state's eyes. The ACTS system shows that. ( http://acts.adhe.edu/studenttransfer.aspx) The increase in students at community colleges might be due to people not wanting to pay big dollars for the same classes. With the increase in pell grants some of the cheaper costing colleges look more inviting. Just my 2 cents.

But if I were a freshman in Arkansas, forget the cost...I'm going to UCA!

1. Community college works for some but the transfer success rate is problematic. I think the state pushes many kids to CC. There is a reason for the cost differential it is not athletics. This is the state education people who think a state developed civics course is as good or better than AP Government but that is another story.

2. UCA is more prone "losing" freshmen to CC since Pulaski Tech is so centrally located in the UCA "trade area". NWACC in Bentonville is very hgard from may in NWA to get to.

3. For some reason UCA wass very late in getting scholarship offers out this spring. I know two high ACT students who quit waiting on UCA and accepted out of state deals.

4. On the other hand, I think the stats may show we had our best year in NWA....I saw lots more announcements in local papers of top students going to UCA than in the past.

It is to early to know what our fall enrollment will be, right now our freshmen numbers are up via my friend in admissions and our overall enrollment is down from this time last year. Part of this is that UCA allowed a lot of weak students to come in 2-3 years ago and many of those have left with poor grades. We also have cut back this year on the number of freshmen scholarships from our operation's budget. One of the reason, we have not had raises for three years was that we were putting lots of our money from operations and salaries into scholarships, the University is cutting the amount back to what is now allowed by State Law. Now we are starting to recruit students who pay to come to UCA. You would think that this transition might take 2-3 years.

Thanks for the info.

For whatever the reason, comm. coll. are getting overwhelmed by new students. PTC set new records last year (which is why I used that example) and seeing the masses this year, I can imagine it will be similar this year. But as for the overall comm. college scene, I have no idea as to enrollment numbers or why they are going there, just a good guess on my part.

The official numbers should be available soon.

stAte just announced a record enrollment of 13,438. Additional students are mostly at the graduate level:


I expect ours to stay about the same as last fall (11,781), or a little lower. We actually had more undergrades (10,146), but half the grad students (1,635).

Many of those students will be leaving ASU as soon as they realize they are stuck in Jonesboro.

Meowwwww!!!

The Chili's in Conway is MUCH better.

I'm surprised it even took you 11 minutes to respond.

What can I say? I like to check in and see what's going on. I figure that reading about ASU's record growth probably feels about the same as it did to us when you guys were printing those T-shirts and running ads about UCA's enrollment.

That's a huge international population and grad school base!

I hope turmoil and bad decisions don't run rampant with you guys like it did with us because of it.

UCA freshman enrollment up 3.9 percent



That is about what I expected to see with overall enrollment. I'm glad to see that Freshmen enrollment is up! We need to work on getting a few more graduate programs.

Have they reported incoming class ACTs?.....if that goes up again, then this class size is all that better....you can get 3000 incoming if you drop ACTs to <18....that is not a good approach.

This total enrollment reflects the effect of the two very large incoming classes of a few years ago before money got cut that are mostly out of school by now.....


Grad school enrollment is university priority but is tough. I think most of our grad students are in education and school admin and health sciences...these are all cost sensitive as most have few scholarhsips....I think MBA program was down some last year due to increasing GRE score requirement....no obvious 1-2 programs to add that will bump much.....

Do we offer grad classes in LR area? Health sciences may be hard to do without lab space but MBA and masters in accounting would seem to be very attractive for LR. If we are not doing this, I would hope we study closely.

We are OK here at these levels with an upward trend in incoming classes....My guess is that 14,000 is still achievable in 3-4 years but we need too grow grad schools to do that....