COVID impacts some private state college enrollments
Public colleges are not the only ones losing students during the pandemic.
Private colleges — some of them at least — are also bleeding students according to preliminary data recently released by the state to Connecticut Hearst Media.
The state’s total loss of higher education students is not known because some institutions — Goodwin University in East Hartford among them —have yet to submit their enrollment tallies to the state. Last fall, Goodwin’s total enrollment stood at 3,297 students.
But like the public Connecticut State College and University system which has seen enrollment slip, factors such as COVID-19 and a dwindling pipeline of college-aged students have led to a decline in several
institutions.
When the final tally is in, enrollment for its 15 private non-profit colleges is predicted to be down about 4 percent overall, according to Jennifer Widness, president of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges.
“Connecticut’s independent colleges, like our public counterparts, are certainly facing significant financial pressures due to COVID-19,” Widness said. “We have significant reductions in room and board revenue due to students opting to learn remotely and efforts to de-densify our dorms as well as incredibly costly re-opening costs, especially related testing.”
While many steps have been taken to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, Widness said the lasting impact will be reflected in budget reductions and belt tightening.
Officials: Drop was expected
For this year, the biggest enrollment declines among the privates were seen at Yale University in New Haven and the University of Bridgeport.
UB, which is in the midst of being acquired by two other private institutions, lost 934 students this fall, bringing its total enrollment to 4,155 — an 18.4 percent drop.
Interim President Stephen Healey said the drop was not unexpected and actually factored into its 2020-21 budget.
“It did not shock us,” Healey said. “We feel like it’s stabilized now.”
Most of the decline, he said, was in graduate and international students. Fewer students are living on campus because of COVID-19.
“This year we had a number of students come, check in and then realize they did not feel comfortable and they didn’t stay on campus,” Healey said.
At Yale, one of the most prestigious schools in the nation, fall enrollment stood at 12,060, a decline of 1,549 students from the previous fall.
The 11.4 percent decline is blamed largely on new and continuing undergraduates opting to take a temporary leave of absence or postponing their matriculation, according to the Yale Undergraduate Admissions Office.
The entire sophomore class was not invited to move back onto campus and Yale provided all continuing students the option to take a semesterlong or year-long leave of absence, and all incoming students the option to postpone matriculation for one year.
About 20 percent of Yale’s incoming first-years opted to take a gap year. In a normal year that would have been about 3 to 4 percent.
Yale officials say the large numbers holding off will not have a negative impact on those applying to be part of Yale’s Class of 2025.
“University leadership has approved a plan to offer admission to the same number of students in this coming cycle as in a typical year,” said Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman. “This year’s first-year class was smaller than usual. Next year’s class will be larger.”
The shift, she said, won’t worsen the odds for this year’s high school seniors to get admitted to the Ivy League school.
Also coming in with fewer students this fall were Connecticut College in New London, Mitchell College Wesleyan University in Middletown, the University of Hartford, the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford and Albertus Magnus College in New Haven.
Combined, those institutions have lost 752 students.
Pandemic trend busters
Other privates bucked the trend and saw modest gains.
Both Fairfield University and neighboring Sacred Heart University saw increases, along with Quinnipiac University in Hamden, the University of New Haven, Post University in Waterbury and even the tiny Paier College in Hamden, which is planning on absorbing UB’s arts programs by next year.
Paier, a for-profit institution, went from 89 to 128 students. Paier and Goodwin are in the process of taking over the University of Bridgeport.
Goodwin President Mark Scheinberg said that when Goodwin’s fall numbers are posted he expects them to be close to, if not slightly higher than, last fall, despite the COVID-19 crisis.
New Haven went up 2.5 percent to 6,961 students. It might have been more if international student enrollment hadn’t continued to plummet, said Greg Eichhorn, vice president of enrollment and student success at UNH.
“We had a great fall,” Eichhorn
said. “We had a great freshman class, way above our goal and our retention rates went up.”
All that, despite virtual open houses and a multitude of social distancing restrictions. Eichhorn said it is hard to say how much it benefited from the transition going on at UB. There were some transfers but not huge numbers, Eichhorn said.
At Fairfield, the 3.1 percent increase might have been even higher were it not for COVID-19. Still, Corry Unis, vice president of strategic enrollment, said the gains, which brought total enrollment to 5,513, were due to a purposeful marketing strategy and increasing retention.
The percentage of freshmen returning for sophomore year is 92 percent.
“That is a high water mark for us,” Unis said.
The increased retention came despite first-year students having to leave the campus abruptly in March to finish the year taking classes online.
Going forward, Unis said the residual COVID-19 impact will play out in giving families more opportunities to visit the campus remotely.
“I think we will always have a virtual presence but I think as soon as it’s safe .... on-campus visits will get the priority,” Unis said. “There is never going to be a substitute for fit and making that emotional connection.”
At Sacred Heart, meanwhile, James Barquinero, a senior vice president for enrollment, attributes the powerful “word of mouth” from alumni and current students, among other things, for the enrollment growth — a 1.5 percent overall increase to 9,313 students.
COVID-19, Barquinero said, has made the campus community stronger.
“This unity harnessed our collective spirit to provide the safest learning and living environment for our students,” Barquinero said.