Texas Tech’s enrollment numbers were released recently and president Lawrence Schovanec sees important progress in areas he calls key indicators of quality growth. Enrollment this fall set a record for the 11th straight year, coming in at 38,803 students. That’s about 1,200 students shy of the 2020 goal of 40,000.
“Of all of the numbers on the enrollment page, I think the most significant numbers are those that relate to retention and graduation rates. Anybody can grow, that’s not our first priority. We want to make sure that those we enroll graduate and are successful. So we’re starting to see progress. Especially in retention, and that’s finally showing up in our graduation rates. We set a record this year for four year graduation, five year. Five year went up two points this year alone, and then we made a one point advance at our six year graduation rate. To put all this in perspective, when we established our strategic plan several years ago, we have a goal of 90% one year retention, and a 70% six year graduation rate. So we were around 82% or so when we began this new initiative, and now we’re at 87%, we’re close to 90%.”
In 2018, first-year retention was at 85 percent, up from 84.1 percent in 2017 and 83. 6 percent in 2016.
Schovanec says it’s not possible to point to one single reason or circumstance that makes retaining students difficult.
“There are multiple reasons. Students in this day and age change majors on average two and a half times, that’s one thing. Here at Texas Tech, students don’t take enough hours each semester. You need to take 15 hours to be on track for a four year graduation rate, and we’re around 14. Many will only take 12, which is a full-time enrollment. You have to change that mindset. There’s compelling evidence that if you look at an extra year of education cost you, in terms of lost earnings, that should in itself provide enough motive.”
Schovanec says he can envision Texas Tech having an enrollment of 45,000 by 2025, but the majority of growth beyond 40,000 would likely come from increased enrollment at Tech’s regional sites. He thinks the Lubbock campus could accommodate 42,000.
He says he’s interested in growing the numbers here of one particular group of students though. This fall there are 6,241 graduate students enrolled, compared with 5,814 two years ago. Schovanec says he’d eventually like to see an enrollment of 8,000 grad students.
“What I’d like to see is more growth in the graduate programs. If you’re a Carnegie R1 school, graduates are very essential to the research enterprise. They also contribute greatly to the prestige of a university. They contribute to the intellectual property and contributions that are made to faculty contributions and research.”
Schovanec says funding rates that the state of Texas pays to public universities will never return to levels that were in place before the recession. He sees also that funding per weighted semester hour is declining in courses like biology, and some engineering and business classes, which once brought in more state money because of their higher funding formula. Those courses cost more to teach and need the additional funding support.
“What has happened in the last few years, there’s been a compression across the weights, where they’ve- pushing everything down to kind of a medium. It isn’t as lucrative as it used to be to teach in certain disciplines across the board. I think it’s a part of the general trend that we’re never going to get back to where we were pre-recession levels. So right now the base rate is around $55, that’s per weighted semester credit hour.”
The goal of reaching 40,000 students by 2020 was set in 2007 by Kent Hance, then the university’s system chancellor. Enrollment then was nearly 28,000. The system’s board of regents in 2009 put that enrollment goal into the university’s strategic plan.