Rimeca Morris planned to head to Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis after her graduation from Wirt-Emerson High School in Gary, but a camp experience this summer at Purdue University Northwest changed her mind.
She fell in love with the campus, grew close to professors and earned A’s — a big confidence booster.
“The campus is small, I love the professors, everyone is real family-like,” said Morris, 19, a communications major who enrolled this fall at the Hammond campus.
The majority of students — like Morris — still come from Northwest Indiana. But faced with a projected drop in the number of high school graduates statewide in coming years, university officials are looking at strategies to boost retention and out-of-state students, said Carmen Panlilio, vice chancellor for enrollment management and student affairs.
Dual-credit decline
Enrollment at Purdue Northwest’s Hammond and Westville campuses has fallen to 12,071 from 15,286 in 2016. The number of students on the Hammond campus fell to 7,630 from 9,194 last year.
The drop is primarily due to a loss of 2,283 dual-credit students on both campuses, a roughly 50 percent decline in one year, Panlilio said. These students take classes that earn both high school and college credit.
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In 2015, the Higher Learning Commission, the federal government’s accrediting agency, announced all dual-credit instructors of academic subjects — mostly K-12 teachers — would be required to have a master’s degree or a master’s and at least 18 credit hours in a subject specialty.
In December, Indiana was given until 2022 for teachers to meet that requirement. But colleges offering dual-credit courses have to set interim benchmarks on how they will make progress on that goal, Panlilio said.
Earlier this year, Purdue Northwest faculty voted for instructors to meet the commission’s requirements by 2019.
In the meantime, a shortage of instructors meeting those qualifications has meant a decline in dual-credit offerings, Panlilio said.
“We have a large percentage of our dual-credit teachers that don’t have those credentials,” she said.
Fighting trend
Purdue Northwest also lost 932 traditional college students — 484 online and 448 on-campus — between Hammond and Westville since last year, Panlilio said. Of the on-campus loss, 110 were from Hammond and she said her office is looking into why.
The National Center for Education Statistics projects Indiana schools will see a decline of 3.6 percent in the number of high school graduates from 2009-10 to 2023-24. To combat that, Purdue Northwest is looking to Illinois, where tuition has risen, and elsewhere to draw students.
The school has made an effort to increase the ratio of full-time students, adding amenities such as on-campus housing. Nearly 80 percent of undergraduate students on both campuses are now full-time, according to university figures.
Nationally, though, undergraduate enrollment at degree-granting higher education institutions declined by 6 percent between 2010 and 2015, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
At Purdue Northwest, freshman enrollment declined to 1,125 from 1,301 last year. But by focusing on retention, a school record number of 68.2 percent of freshmen returned as sophomores.
In a statement, Chancellor Thomas Keon lauded the school’s tighter admission standards and strong freshman academic scores.
“Our student population has been changing tremendously over the past several years. The increased academic standards we are setting for our institution is apparent through the quality of our student body,” he said.
“This year’s freshman class is a fantastic example of this with the students having an average ACT score of 22 and an average high school grade point average of 3.23.”
According to school records, PNW drew these numbers of degree-seeking students this year from the region: Hammond, 1,224; Crown Point, 638; Valparaiso, 632; LaPorte, 399; Munster, 382; Highland, 358; Schererville, 318; Portage, 305; Dyer, 297; Michigan City, 286; Chicago, 260; Gary, 248; Chesterton, 244; Hobart, 227; Merrillville, 226; Griffith, 211; East Chicago, 197; St. John, 189; Lowell, 169; Cedar Lake, 162; and Whiting, 109.
Its students are 59.8 percent white, 19.8 percent Hispanic, 10 percent African-American, 2.9 percent biracial or multiracial, 1.8 percent Asian, 0.2 percent American Indian/Alaskan, and 1 percent unknown, according to a news release.
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