As Jacksonville grows, UNF aims to enroll 25,000 students by 2028, raise academic profile
University of North Florida officials are nursing dramatic plans to grow enrollment by nearly 50 percent over five years, reaching 25,000 students by 2028.
They’ve embraced the first new on-campus housing construction in 15 years, a 521-bed dorm for honors students, as a sign of changes to come.
“We want UNF to be the destination of choice. … Today, we are starting the work,” UNF President Moez Limayem told supporters at a ceremonial groundbreaking last week for the four-story, roughly 165,000-square-foot residence hall that's already under construction, slated to open in the fall of 2025.
The growth target is part of a five-year strategic plan endorsed last month by the state university system’s Board of Governors intended to raise both UNF’s academic and public profiles.
The new hall, priced at almost $14 million, will be for students in the academically centered Hicks Honors College, reinforcing an aim of the plan to build UNF’s intellectual muscle.
An objective within UNF’s plan is to improve its standing in annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings, earning a spot among the country’s top 100 public schools. UNF’s latest ranking was 129th.
Pursuing better rankings isn’t empty trophy-hunting, said Limayem, who called his school’s goals “audacious.”
He said U.S. News uses a methodology that incorporates standards important to raising UNF’s academic performance, which in turn feeds UNF’s ambitions to grow by raising its reputation.
“Growing in prominence will attract students from Florida and across the nation,” says the plan, which emphasizes “strategically increasing enrollment in high-demand fields.”
'Provider of talent'
Singled out in the plan as special focuses are advanced manufacturing; coastal resilience; data science, cybersecurity and information technology; transportation and logistics; and health care and health sciences.
The fields are areas where business leaders have said there are pressing needs for trained workers, and UNF’s plan labels the school “a top provider of talent in Florida.”
The strategic plan was approved by the school’s trustees last summer and has been cited by UNF administrators since then in discussion about expanding degree offerings, such as a doctor of health administration degree that trustees endorsed adding in December.
Some changes were already in progress in response to market demands. UNF’s bachelor’s program in advanced manufacturing is the only on in the state university system, and last month, before the strategic plan was blessed in Tallahassee, the school reached an agreement for contact-lens manufacturer Johnson & Johnson MedTech to provide graduate stipends and undergraduate scholarships as UNF hired an engineering professor to do manufacturing research and development in a lab outfitted with Johnson & Johnson equipment.
Limayem said the school’s enrollment growth will involve students at all education levels and students enrolled in hybrid online/in-person courses as well as traditional classroom settings.
The school has just under 17,000 students now, making hitting the 25,000 target, a roughly 47 percent increase that Limayem told people at the groundbreaking would happen by 5 p.m. on June 30, 2028.
UNF’s plans don’t appear to envision faculty growing as fast as the student body, however.
Last semester, the university had 690 faculty members, 18 permanent part-timers and about 300 adjunct instructors and projects needing at least 50 to 80 more full-time faculty by 2028 and a similar increase in adjuncts, a UNF spokeswoman said. Factors including creation of new programs and changing classroom uses could change the final number of hires, she said.
Approval of the strategic plan in Tallahassee was overshadowed last month by the Board of Governors approving regulations that barred diversity spending and led Limayem to announce his university would be “phasing out” arms of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion including the LGBTQ Center and Women’s Center.
Diversity advocates have argued the new rules, required by Florida’s Legislature, will hinder state universities’ efforts to recruit and retain talented people from traditionally marginalized backgrounds.
But Limayem, a native of Tunisia in North Africa who previously led the University of South Florida's college of business, said Northeast Florida’s growing population and robust business environment make expanding UNF a necessity, with benefits to both students and faculty.
How will UNF change?
The strategic plan includes targets of raising average faculty compensation from $74,741 now to $85,000 in 2028; earning places for UNF on two “best places to work” surveys; and nearly doubling the school’s income from fundraising to $50 million a year.
The plan envisions nearly doubling the number of industry-related grants and contracts the school lands, increasing spending on research and development tracked by the National Science Foundation and growing the number of research-focused doctorate degrees earned each year.
Other plan targets include higher high-school grade-point averages for entering students; higher rates of retention after the first year and graduation in four years; and modest increases in the median wage graduates earn the year after getting their degrees.
The strategic plan doesn't require expansion beyond UNF's 1,381-acres Southside campus but significant constrction separate from the residence hall is unederway or proposed.
Increased classrooms and study space near UNF's library and a makeover of the computer science building are listed among top priorities in UNF's capital improvement plan, while a lower-ranked proposal, which may not hapen, suggests converting a 53,000-square-foot building the university now leases to ADT Security Services, into classrooms and lab space for advanced manufacturing reasearch.
UNF’s growth will benefit Jacksonville and the state, university supporters said, pointing to data saying more UNF graduates remain in Florida than counterparts in the rest of Florida’s other state universities.
That fact resonated with Jacksonville City Council member Will Lahnen, whose parents graduated UNF in 1974, two years after the school opened.
One became a teacher, the other a small business owner, using what they had learned as they built lives in the city that surrounds the university, he told people at the residence hall groundbreaking.
Lahnen represents the council district that includes the campus, and said he was excited to see the university continue to draw more students.
State officials and lawmakers in Tallahassee have been supportive, UNF Board of Trustees Chairman Kevin Hyde told people during the groundbreaking, and said UNF looked well-positioned to prosper in the years ahead.
“It’s a new day,” Hyde said.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: UNF aims to have 25,000 students by 2028, near 50% growth over 5 years
