UC not keeping up with enrollment

The University of Cincinnati isn’t big enough – it wants to be bigger, maybe even too big
to fail.

While UC is in no real danger of bankruptcy, the phrase “too big to fail” – all too familiar to most of us now – seems to echo when Valerie Hardcastle, dean of Arts & Sciences, said “[The record 2009-10 freshman enrollment] is not that big of an increase for [A&S] to manage, because we’re so big already.”

Wow. UC’s largest college accounts for 20 percent of university majors, and with 5,200 freshman currently enrolled for the fall, A&S alone will see about a 13 percent increase, or about 500 students, for A&S faculty to handle, Hardcastle said.

Not all of those students will be calling A&S their home college, but roughly 47 percent of all undergraduates will have to take classes in the college, most notably the English composition sequence, to satisfy core requirements for graduation. Because A&S teaches students outside the college as well, tuition dollars are collected from those students, but they aren’t as profitable as A&S majors.

In January, at a town-hall style meeting for A&S faculty, Hardcastle said, “If we don’t [increase enrollment], we’ll have to cut faculty.” She also reported a projected $4.9 million deficit, which would require the college to increase its enrollment by 500 majors to avoid any more cuts to the operating budget or personnel.

Well, enrollment has increased, but the uncertainty of Gov. Strickland’s budget passing still looms.

“Right now, I think it’s looking pretty solid that his budget will pass or something close enough to it, that we’ll be OK,” Hardcastle said.

And if it doesn’t?

“Come back in June or July and I can be more sure of our numbers,” Hardcastle said.  (News of whether the governor’s budget passes is expected in June.)

Some numbers, ones that are available now, show a 900-1 ratio of students to advisers
in A&S.

Four months ago, UC had plans to hire 30 additional advisers university wide to help manage the semesters conversion. Hardcastle said A&S is planning to hire more advisers, but did not say how many.

“We’re hiring one new adviser right now,” she said. “So actually, the ratios will go down even with the new student enrollment
coming in.

“That said, I know our numbers are really, really bad right now.”

Yes, indeed they are. Even Billie Burton, the assistant dean in A&S, said its advisers’ caseloads are much higher than the national average.

Considering UC’s Main Campus is a giant square in Clifton, with little or no room to expand, one can’t help but wonder if there’s enough space for UC to continue to grow, especially if it wants to bring in the more lucrative out-of-state students who need a roof over their heads.

Two residence halls, Morgens and Scioto, are closed for renovations. For how long?

They’re scheduled to reopen for ... uh, we don’t know, actually. Todd Duncan, director of Housing and Food Services, won’t call us back and apparently has issued a gag order to anyone who knows anything about those buildings.

But those don’t matter anyway, right?

“One of the dorms that’s closed was primarily for graduate students, so it doesn’t affect the undergraduate population at all if it’s closed,” Hardcastle said. “And we took over Stratford Heights, so I think in theory we can shift the undergraduates that were living in [Scioto] to Stratford Heights and come up with kind of a net-zero change.”

So the graduate students still don’t have a place to live on campus, there’s still no mention of a new on-campus residence and their tuition is going to rise next year.

“It was noted at the [May 19] Board of Trustees meeting that [UC] is currently at capacity for dorm rooms, which is good for the university,” Hardcastle said.
Is the university at capacity in terms of enrollment?

“No,” Hardcastle said. “The university plan was to have our enrollment be at 40,000 [students], so we’re a couple thousand shy.”
Can UC handle 40,000 students?

Yes. But only if you commute via magic carpet (there’s not a lot of parking around here), don’t mind waiting two or three weeks for a meeting with your adviser and Gov. Strickland can politically manage the idea that education in Ohio should only take a 2 percent budget cut when every other state agency has been cut 15 to 20 percent.