UCF tapping the brakes
As new campus takes flight, enrollment slowing after decades of rapid growth
In an ad two years ago, a teenager opened her admissions offer, a performer stepped into the spotlight and a football player charged onto a field all uttering the same phrase: “This is big.”
The video flipped a common dig at the University of Central Florida into a rallying cry. With 68,000 students, the state’s largest university was proud of its size. And it remains so, even as school leaders quietly take steps to slow the rapid growth that defined the last three decades at UCF.
“I’m not sure we’ll lead with that, but we won’t apologize for it,” Interim President Thad Seymour said. “Our size is a real strength.”
Still, as UCF prepares on Monday to open a new campus in downtown Orlando that it will share with Valencia College, this fall’s freshman class has been intentionally reduced by about 200 to 300 students.
Also, the school is cutting back on transfers outside of the popular DirectConnect program that guarantees admission to associate degree recipients at six state colleges with the focus now on strengthening UCF’s signature programs and getting students to graduation.
While the school’s intentions didn’t become public until recently, Seymour, the school’s interim president since February, said plans for slowing the school’s growth were underway under the direction of former President John Hitt. Enrollment tripled during Hitt’s 26-year tenure before he retired in June 2018. UCF has been the state’s largest university since 2009, when it overtook the University of Florida.
The slow-growth transition occurs despite the university’s foot
print extending into the longplanned Creative Village complex that encompasses the area around the former Amway Arena, which was demolished in 2012.
The physical expansion doesn’t mean the school is adding students. UCF is moving several existing programs, including nine undergraduate majors, giving the university much-needed housing and classroom capacity, Seymour said.
But even as Hitt, who championed the downtown campus, planned his departure, the school continued to tout its size. About the same time UCF rolled out the “This is big” video, the university put out print ads with the slogan “Scale x Excellence = Impact.” The slogan appeared on materials disseminated in late 2017 during a national search for Hitt’s successor.
“The way we look at it, by any measure, we’ve achieved scale,” Seymour said during a recent interview.
At the same time, he said, UCF has made strides in many areas. Graduation and retention rates have improved, and the university is granting more degrees in highpriority areas, such as health care and engineering.
Now, Seymour said, the university will “double down on our focus on the excellence part of that equation.”
Backing away from ‘This is big’
Just as UCF leaders are quick to point out the school’s size allows them to produce thousands of graduates for the Central Florida economy each year, critics suggest the university has overextended itself.
The Board of Governors, which oversees the state university system, grilled Hitt and his successor, Dale Whittaker, about the matter during a meeting last year.
UCF had made “excellent gains” in recent years on the state’s performance funding measures, which include areas including graduation rates and average cost of undergraduate degrees, Vice Chairman Sidney Kitson said, but he urged school leaders to aim higher.
“Is the institution at a point where it might be getting too big?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Hitt responded, adding admissions had become even more competitive as the university had grown. He wasn’t seeing “trouble signs,” he said.
Kitson didn’t respond to an email from the Sentinel seeking comment about UCF’s current plans to moderate its growth.
Tensions also flared last fall when more than 2,000 people, including students, alumni and parents signed a petition complaining about a new course format in the College of Business Administration that placed roughly 1,200 students in each course and most of the instruction was online.
College leaders acknowledged the courses were designed to be an economical way to serve 8,500 undergraduates but also said the approach offered benefits, including pushing students to take more responsibility for their own learning.
Supersized courses are becoming increasingly common at UCF, where the number of sections with 100 or more undergraduates grew between 2013 and 2018, according to data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. And the total number of undergraduate course sections shrunk during that time, even as enrollment increased.
Though some students like the anonymity of huge lecture halls, those settings typically aren’t ideal for learning, said Howard Bunsis, a council member for the American Association of University Presidents who has studied university budgets and reviewed UCF’s data at the Sentinel’s request.
“From a teaching perspective, how can you get to know your students if there are 400 kids in the class?” asked Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University.
He described UCF’s growth as “stunning.”
“I can’t tell you how big that is — that’s enormous,” Bunsis said.
‘A real challenge ahead of us’
Many universities, including UCF, trumpet the high school grade-point averages and college entrance exam scores of their incoming freshmen each fall, boasting about their ability to attract an even more promising group of young adults than they did in the previous year.
But Seymour and his colleague, Valencia College President Sandy Shugart, downplay the significance of those measures.
“Our measure of success isn’t what credentials they come in with, it’s have we done the best work possible to prepare that student for once they leave here,” Seymour said.
However, as the university tries to maintain its current size and keep the doors open to DirectConnect students, freshmen admissions likely will become more competitive, Seymour acknowledged.
That’s “not necessarily the objective, but the reality,” he said.
While UCF welcomes roughly 7,000 traditional freshmen each year, that’s not how the majority of undergraduates get to UCF. About 10,000 students transfer each year from state colleges, largely from institutions that are part of the DirectConnect program.
The number of transfers to UCF through DirectConnect, which has been in place since 2006, has plateaued over the past several years, which Shugart attributes to a strong economy. But he anticipates Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties will add 76,000 undergraduates by 2040, based on population estimates and current college-growing rates.
Most of them likely will attend Valencia, already the area’s largest state college, doubling its current enrollment of roughly 60,000, though nearly two-thirds attend part-time.
“We’ve got a real challenge ahead of us and if we don’t meet it, what happens is access gets rationed and it gets rationed unintentionally,” Shugart said. “The people who are least savvy about higher education get left behind.”
To allow UCF to focus on research and graduate programs, Shugart said he expects Valencia, which has traditionally focused on associate degrees and shortterm programs, will award more bachelors degrees. That transition has already started to occur, as Valencia recently has added bachelor’s degree programs in nursing and business that are flourishing.
As UCF reigns in its undergraduate enrollment, Shugart said he hopes the area’s main university can focus on bolstering programs in areas such as life sciences that align with the needs of local industries.
“Does being big mean they’re not good? No, not at all,” Shugart said. “But it does mean a lot of issues are consumed dealing with demand at the undergraduate level and it’s hard to free up resources to do other things that might serve the community as well.”
The city’s failed bid to attract Amazon’s second headquarters was a reminder of that, said Seymour, who came to the university in 2015 from developer Tavistock and was picked to lead the institution on a short-term basis after Whittaker resigned in the wake of a scandal over misspent funds.
The Orlando area offered $400 million of incentives, free land and possibilities, but Seymour said Amazon sought a location that already had plenty of software developers and other technically skilled people.
“That was just a reminder that our aspirations to diversify and grow the Central Florida economy — if there’s one variable that matters, it’s where are you going to get the talent from and that’s an obligation we have to keep providing that and get better and better,” he said.
‘This incredible responsibility’
On Wednesday, hundreds of students and families moved into UnionWest, the privately developed 15-story tower that includes housing, academic advising and other services at the new downtown campus. More than 600 students signed up to live there the first year, putting the building at 95% capacity. More than 7,000 students are signed up for classes.
A key part of the Creative Village, UCF and Valencia leaders say the new campus also puts students within walking distance of potential employers and gives residents of a historically underserved area better access to higher education. Seymour described the venture as one of the city’s most transformative projects during a media tour of the campus.
Several of the UCF students who moved into UnionWest this week said they were drawn there because they wanted something different than the sprawling main campus.
“I love the downtown and I wanted to experience city life,” said Joe Osdon, a 19-year-old junior who transferred from Indian River State College in Stuart this year.
The addition gives UCF something else in common with Arizona State University, also among the country’s largest universities, which opened a campus in downtown Phoenix in 2006 with a little more than 3,000 students. Roughly four times that number now attend the downtown campus.
Often, students who come to a new campus are “pioneers” who want to be among the first to try something new, Rick Naimark, Arizona State associate vice president for program development planning. Others are looking for an urban feel or need to be close to their work or homes.
“You do have to have somewhat of a critical mass,” he said.
Like UCF, Arizona State emphasizes inclusivity in admissions. That philosophy has led to phenomenal growth. Arizona State’s enrollment has risen from a little over 63,000 in 2006 to roughly 111,000 in fall 2018. Much of that increase, though not all of it, has been in online courses.
“What we have said is if you are qualified to attend, we will be responsible for admitting you and be responsible for your success here,” Naimark said.
As one of just three public universities in the state, Arizona State feels compelled to meet the demand for higher education there, Naimark said.
At UCF, Seymour and other leaders speak in similar ways about their mission.
“We’ve had a fast-growing region for decades that continues to need talent that comes out of a college or university and we’re the largest provider,” Seymour said. “We have this incredible responsibility to provide fuel for the growth of the region in the years ahead.”
That won’t change, he said. But during the next decade and beyond, Seymour said he expects the discussion to be “less about growth and more about ensuring that students who come here are incredibly successful while we’re here and then when they leave.”