Growth high on SAU chief’s list

Berry aims to keep school’s momentum, enroll 5,000 by ’25

MAGNOLIA — The new president at Southern Arkansas University is a list maker.

If he’s lucky, Trey Berry will mark off two or three in a day. Otherwise, there’s more to pile on — more in handwritten reminders on SAU letterhead, more on his meeting agendas and more on sticky notes across his computer screen.

And there usually is more to pile on at the Magnolia university that grew to new heights this fall.

Now, the university is home to 4,138 students, a 16.7 percent increase from last fall. The school is inching into one of the state’s fastest-growing with a 33 percent jump in the past decade, still behind Arkansas Tech University in Russellville and the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville campuses. And by 2025, Berry has set a goal for the university to reach more than 5,000 students.

The momentum has been building, Berry said. Almost five months into Berry’s presidency, he said it’s been a whirlwind. More of a hurricane, actually. A good one.

He plans to focus his tenure on what he called the four Ps: people, planning, programs and philanthropy.

“Over the past 13 years, we had over $100 million worth of construction — including a new science building, agriculture building, several new dormitories, a Mulerider activity center, baseball facility — so a lot of different facilities that allow us now to start concentrating on the people at SAU, which includes our students and our faculty and staff,” Berry said.

The people part has worked out already. For at least the last three years, the entering freshman class has increased by about 70 students, said Donna Allen, SAU’s vice president for stu-

dent affairs.

“We’re concentrating a lot more in Texas and Louisiana,” Berry said, referring to recruitment. “We’re concentrating in other parts of Arkansas, and we also have a lot more to concentrate on in graduate level.”

The university also will work to increase its international students, who hail from 39 countries — all pinned on a map hanging on a wall in Berry’s office.

“Here we are in little Magnolia in south Arkansas, and we’re really kind of a global campus really,” he said. “It’s word of mouth. It spreads. One person will call, and another person will call another.”

Aggressive recruiting isn’t the end of the line, though. Each day, Berry will get a list from the admissions office of prospective students who have taken campus tours. And each day, he’ll sit at his desk — piled with papers, including his lists — and write notes to those students, telling them how glad he was they visited.

The programs portion is also carrying over from his previous job as the university’s provost. In that role, he started two degree programs: engineering — the first program of its kind in the southern half of the state — and game and animation. And those programs have flourished.

Industry partners have donated $400,000 to the university for engineering equipment.

“A lot of these industries were hiring students and graduates from other parts of the country,” Berry said. “And they were finding out that many of them would come for a couple of years and then move back, and so they had to retrain and retrain and retrain. So, they really wanted someone that grew up here, that was from this region, that wanted to be here and live here that would give them stability.”

The industries also have allowed engineering students to intern at their businesses before graduation. Thirty-two businesses have signed up for that so far.

The engineering program in its second year has nearly doubled its enrollment with 130 students. The next step for the university is to seek accreditation from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology Inc.

Berry is hoping to get the state’s OK for a new degree program in cybersecurity in January.

The programming also has led to the enrollment spurt, Berry said. And with that, on-campus housing has been in higher demand. This fall, the university is housing 1,600 students, 40 more than capacity, said Allen, the vice president for student affairs. Most of the students are undergraduates.

The university tripled the double rooms in two residence halls, doubled the single rooms in an entire hall and gave roommates to the resident assistants, she said. SAU also created more space out of storage rooms and lobbies that hadn’t been used before, she said.

The influx — mostly freshmen — has prompted the university to build two more 132-bed residence halls, she said. SAU officials hope the three-story dormitories will be built across the street from the football stadium by fall 2016.

“Campus housing is the students’ home away from home,” Allen said. “They spend only approximately 15 hours per week in class and the other 153 is mostly spent in their residence halls. They have to be comfortable and we have to provide a safe and secure environment for study, sleep, and socializing.”

The Alumni Association will help the university issue taxfree bonds for the construction in part to expedite the process. The association, a nonprofit, will secure the funding for student housing, while SAU will have an agreement about rent collection, deposits, and loan payment obligations, Allen said.

“We’re going to borrow $20 million, and I hope we have to do it again,” said David Butler, the association board’s president. “We keep growing and growing. As the college grows, we’ll need more restaurants, more stores. We definitely are in the momentum stage right now.”

The last portions of Berry’s plans aren’t going to be that easy.

“Well, we are hopeful, and one of the things I set as a goal was to start the most ambitious fundraising campaign in our history,” Berry said. “We know we have to. Fundraising is going to be key to the future.”

As the Alumni Association leader, Butler — who is also the prosecuting attorney for the 13th Judicial District — said he has a role in fundraising, too. He often travels across the state, and any chance he can get, he’ll talk up SAU.

And the association, with 17,000 members, will keep trying to find more Muleriders. Get them to come back to the place they once called home, he said. And the most important, he said, is reuniting with close classmates — “all the people you were in the trenches with,” Butler said.

The university has an endowment of about $31 million, Berry said. It will soon start a feasibility study on how much of the university’s dream can become reality. Berry’s dream is to double the endowment and focus on scholarships.

“If you look at the news and you see that our national student debt is larger than credit card debt in the nation, it’s a big problem for this generation of students and we can’t continue as institutions to put all that on the backs of our students,” he said. “We have to have ways where they can come and not leave campus and graduate with so much debt. And the only way we’re going to do that is if we center in on scholarships being priority one.”

He’s hoping to kick off the fundraising campaign by fall 2016.

In the meantime, it’s on his lists. It’s the only way to keep up with the ideas he has every minute, he said.

And when he needs a great escape?

“Every evening, my wife and I drive around campus on this [golf cart], and we pick up trash and we go see everything,” he said. “There’s something every single night. I think we can go around the whole campus in like 30 minutes. It’s not bad, not bad at all.”