Enrollment on upward trend at UTPB

Oct. 22—Having served more than 7,000 students last year, University of Texas Permian Basin is looking at a continued upward trend.

"When you look at fall, which is the snapshot that we have right now for the registration that just happened, we are overall, up just under 4%," President Sandra Woodley said. "So 5,713 is the number of headcount for fall enrollment. ... We're really proud of that. We worked really hard to make sure that we turned the enrollment around. We had a little bit of dip last year post-COVID; some challenges that we have there."

"But if you look at our student credit hours, in other words, the number of classes that students are taking, that's up 7.5 percent. Many more students are taking full loads," Woodley added.

She said some of that can be attributed to the Falcon Free program.

"One of the criteria was that you had to be full-time; take at least 12 hours. We're really thrilled that 44% of our undergraduate students are receiving Falcon Free funding. I think with that, along with all of our other scholarships that we have in place, and we have more and more every year, the financial burden for our students is declining. They have the ability to take more hours; work fewer hours at an external job to make ends meet; and our trends are very exciting right now and headed up," Woodley said.

UTPB has used its Falcon Free funds for this year, but she said it is recurring amount of money.

"We have a $1 million a year. We may be able to, with some additional scholarships, help some for Falcon Free this spring. But for the most part, the Falcon Free was exhausted in the fall. We found a way to help ... all the students who qualified by the deadline. But even after the deadline, we were able to help additional students and we have other scholarship dollars as well, that we're able to connect with Falcon Free like Texas Grant, and of course, the Pell Grant is part of that, to make sure that as many students as possible receive this tuition and required fees-free situation at the institution."

The university is now registering students for next fall and the rate is higher than at this time last year.

"... Here we are in the fall and people are applying for next fall. That's an exciting situation for us as well. We will continue to seek out additional scholarship dollars philanthropically. We're happy to announce that we had our first annual scholarship ball and we are still counting, but we received over $500,000 in scholarship pledges there at that ball, all of that will go for scholarships for students, so that will help supplement Falcon Free in some of our other programs ... for next fall," she added.

Chief of Staff/VP of Communications and Marketing Tatum Hubbard said students are deciding where they want to go to school next fall right now.

"Those juniors and seniors are already being hit and they have to know about the opportunity that exists at this university, because we want them to choose us," Hubbard said.

Woodley noted that fewer people register for the first time in the spring.

"... Most of our students have a full year of Falcon Free. There may be some students who might want to start for the first time in the spring, but for the most part, our students were packaged for a full year this fall for Falcon Free," Woodley said.

Most UTPB students come from within 150 miles of Odessa.

"We are focusing here on Grow Your Own. We want to make sure that we serve the Permian Basin region and we're very happy that we're the regional comprehensive institution here in the Permian Basin and that we serve the students that are here in our surrounding areas," Woodley said.

The university also saw an increase in international students. She said they had about 115 last year and they have more than doubled that number this year.

"... Our transfers from the community college is up higher than it than it ever has (been) — 36% increase in transfer students this fall. And of course, our key transfer partners are Odessa College and Midland College. Most of the transfers come from Odessa College, but we have a growing number who also come to us from Midland College, as well," Woodley said.

The rate of first time in college students was up 43%; graduate students are up 3.2 percent; and undergraduates are up 7 percent.

"It was a good fall," she said.

Woodley said students are enrolling all the time, but there is a natural deadline for the 16-week courses. A lot of online classes are offered in eight-week timeframes.

"... That's part of the reason why you can't just look at the fall numbers to determine what our enrollment is because when you count the number of students that we served in an entire academic year is over 7,000 students," Woodley said.

She anticipates it will be over 7,000 when they get the final numbers this year.

The unduplicated headcount annual numbers come from IPEDS,which stands for Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

IPEDS is the National Center for Education Statistics' core postsecondary education data collection program, the site said. It is designed to help NCES meet its mandate to report full and complete statistics on the condition of postsecondary education in the United States, the site said.

"The unduplicated headcount annual numbers come from IPEDS. We report to the federal government ... on that particular data point and they're finalizing and clarifying those data points right now. We should know within the next month officially, what the report will be to IPEDS, but we know it will be more than 7,000 students," Woodley said.

"When we look at our fall headcount, for example, there ear a number of different ways that's done. The operational data is one way that we capture students who are here in the fall, but we also have to submit data to the (Texas Higher Education) Coordinating Board. And the Coordinating Board numbers are always lower because they don't count all of your students for the funding. ... There are a lot of enrollment numbers out there, and they're all correct they just all have a different data definition depending on what the data are for so that makes it a little bit confusing. But IPEDS is really our go-to metric because it's nationally reported and it's comparable to other institutions and it counts all of our students," Woodley said.

UTPB students run the gamut from first-time, full-time students to older students going back to school.

"We have multiple student populations and they're all important to us. As a first-generation student who had to work part time, we are never given up on that. We're very excited to to have our adult students who work full time. Many of them and can only go part time," Woodley said.

"In fact, over 55% of our students are part time, which is significantly higher than any other UT school. We serve the students who go part time and and take longer than six years to graduate. It's one of the reason why our graduation rates are lower. That particular metric only captures first-time, full time students who generally come right out of high school and make their way through in a cohort. But it's also true that we're growing that cohort and so when you look at the significant increase in our first-time ... freshmen — higher than it's ever been — we care about that, too."

She added that both of those strategies are important and they're different.

"The work that Dr. Becky Spurlock (vice president of Student Development and Leadership)and her team, and Tatum Hubbard and her team have done on the recruiting and enrollment management and marketing is to make sure that we have specific strategies dedicated to the appropriate population group because they need different things," Woodley said.

"Our adult students need different kinds of support than our ... freshmen students, for example, in some ways. We want to make sure that we differentiate our student success initiatives and our recruiting and enrollment in our marketing in a way that we can serve all the student populations that can come here and get their degree," she added.

She added that more than half of UTPB's students are Hispanic.

"We're really proud of that designation. We're a minority serving institution, as well. I love the diversity on our campus in every way from the students and the faculty and the staff. It's a very richly rewarding group of people to hang out with here and I think there's a culture of belonging and inclusion here. People want to help others to succeed and and I think there's a general sense that we also want to learn more about different cultures and all things that we have here on the campuses. We have quite a melting pot here and we're proud that," Woodley said.

Most of the students are women and she noted that this is a national phenomenon, but she's not sure why that is. She added that there are a lot of theories out there.

"We want to make sure that we help to reverse that trend. We need all of our men and women to go to college and we'd like to support that," Woodley said.