Matt McFarland plans to brave the workforce once he graduates next spring. However, it might be a short-lived escape from home if no jobs are waiting for him when he leaves.
“There’s about a 50-50 chance that I’ll come back for graduate school,” said McFarland, a junior in economics.
McFarland isn’t alone. A stormy economy is keeping more Utah students in the state close to the nest.
For all of Utah’s colleges and universities, there was an increase of more than 9,500 students, jumping Spring Semester enrollment by more than 7 percent.
But at the U, the growth was not nearly as substantial. The Utah System of Higher Education announced that 129 more students are enrolled at the U this Spring Semester than the previous year.
Except for the College of Eastern Utah, the U had the second smallest growth of the nine institutions included in the report. Paul Brinkman, U vice president for budget and planning, said that the reason the U is so far behind the year’s average growth of 1,000 students for each institution, is because of its selectivity.
“A lot of institutions have open enrollment, so the U doesn’t accept as many as they do,” Brinkman said. Although it’s easy for anyone to enroll in a class or two, as they would at any community college, the U’s degree programs are much more difficult to enter into, he said.
Although some students, such as freshman dance major Daniel Mont-Eton, want to brave the job market and never look back, more students are considering graduate programs to prolong the education process as well as improve their résumé amid tightening competition.
According to a Michigan State University study, jobs available to college students and recent graduates are down 8 percent from last year.
“When job opportunities lessen, people return to college for more education or training,” said William Sederburg, state commissioner of higher education. For instance, Zach Franzoni, a freshman in architecture, is planning to be at the U until at least 2014 to earn a doctorate degree.
If a loss of jobs wasn’t enough, the economy is crippling students’ abilities to pay for college means they have to devote more time to part-time jobs or alternative schooling. Sarah
Young, a sophomore in theater arts, said she can’t take as many classes as she’d like because of her hours working at the Marriott Library computer lab. The part-time job helps pay for her increasingly expensive education, a burden she chose to lessen by first attending Salt Lake Community College.
“I earned my generals there because it was cheaper,” she said.
The community college saw the greatest hike in enrollment in 2009, with 2,580 more students than last year’s Spring Semester.
SLCC’s enormous growth is more of the rule this year, leaving the U’s comparatively measly numbers the exception. Administrators hope that the increasingly sustained enrollment expresses higher education’s needs to the Utah Legislature. The strain of servicing more and more students in light of the impending budget cuts puts a lot of pressure on every university, Sederburg said.
Relief isn’t around the corner, either. Sederburg said in a statement that he expects the numbers to keep growing next year. Such growth might pose a dangerous catch-22 for prospective students. As more students stick around and retain their place in class, it means there will be fewer available seats for new students.