This story is republished with permission by The Laramie Reporter.
The University of Wyoming’s student headcount has fallen once again, from 10,819 students last fall to 10,630 this semester, continuing a steady downward trend that began more than a decade ago.
UW enrollment has fallen by more than 20% since 2015.
Figures shared during the UW Board of Trustees meeting Thursday show this year’s 1.7% drop in overall enrollment has been driven by a 2.2% drop in on-campus Laramie enrollment and a nearly 4% drop in the number of first-time, in-state students.
There are some figures cutting against the overall downward trend, which UW highlighted in a news release Thursday:
- There are 2,081 students now pursuing a degree online through UW, up 1.1% from last year.
- The overall number of first-year students rose by 4.7%, from 1,444 last year to 1,512 this year;
- The number of transfer students rose by 6%, from 772 last year to 818 this year. According to UW’s release, “The overall increase in new transfer students came from both inside and outside Wyoming. The in-state transfer student number grew from 574 last year to 599 this fall — a 4.4 percent increase — while nonresident transfers jumped 10.6 percent, from 198 to 219.”
But UW Board of Trustees Vice Chair Laura Schmid-Pizzato said the overall trend deserves the most attention.
“I think this is our No. 1 focus that we need to have at the university right now,” she said. “We have a 1% decrease. That’s nominal, I get that. But every year it’s 1%, 2%, 3%. Every single year we’re going down in the wrong direction. And while there’s encouraging information, it’s not encouraging enough that it makes an impact for the next year.”
Universities across the nation saw enrollment fall amid the pandemic, and others are struggling in the face of a demographic cliff that has meant fewer students graduating from high school. But another significant shift has been changing views about the value of a college education.
In the pandemic and post-pandemic years, UW enrollment has fallen by more than 13%. The student body today is about 1,600 students smaller than it was in the fall semester before the 2020 pandemic.
“Everybody lost students during COVID,” Schmid-Pizzato said. “We are one of the institutions that’s not bouncing back, and there are many institutions that are.”
While the university’s freshman class grew by almost 5% this year, the increase was driven entirely by out-of-state students, as the number of in-state recruits fell.
“The new first-time class includes 620 students from outside Wyoming, a whopping 19.9 percent increase from last year’s 517,” according to UW’s news release. “That more than offset a 3.8 percent dip in the number of first-time students from Wyoming, from 927 last year — the second-largest class of Wyoming freshmen in the past 17 years — to 892 this fall.”
UW’s associate vice president of marketing and communications Chad Baldwin, one of the university’s chief recruiters, said he has been tracking similar enrollment decreases at other land-grant universities such as University of Nebraska-Lincoln, South Dakota State University and North Dakota State University.
“The one competitor that is reporting some positive numbers: Montana State [University] reporting [they’re] up 1.8% overall, and their first-year class, they’re saying, is up 5.7%.”
Wyoming, meanwhile, has been attracting even more students from those same states. Shelley Dodd, the interim vice provost for enrollment management, credited the advent of UW’s “Good Neighbor” scholarship with boosting these figures. The scholarship offers $2,000 to high school graduates in states bordering Wyoming.
“We are up in Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana,” Dodd said. “I think the Good Neighbor dollars that we were able to award really helped change the conversation for some of the students out-of-state to think, ‘Yeah, I really want to go here.’”
Baldwin pointed to another factor depressing student headcount: a faster pipeline to graduation for students who are already enrolled.
“One last number that’s really important, that we should maybe celebrate more than any, is the University of Wyoming graduated the biggest number of graduates in its history in this past year,” Baldwin told the trustees. “Over 3,100 students gained diplomas or certificates from the university. That’s an absolutely new record, and that has an impact on the overall headcount, but that is absolutely something to celebrate.”
Meanwhile, early numbers show enrollment at some of the state's community colleges is up, largely fueled by high school students taking dual enrollment classes.
