24
September 2012
from
Freshmen, pg. 22
Rebecca said she “got stuck there” through Penn State housing’s lottery system. “I didn’t get drawn the first time or the second time and when I got drawn the third time, I got supplemental housing,” Rebecca said. “I don’t know the people I’m living with, but I don’t want to catch anything.” The joke-filled expose, shot in the dorm room of an unspecified Penn State building, predates the official promotional “Supplemental Housing” videos which the Penn State: Auxiliary & Business Services Marketing team shot for its official YouTube channel this May. “When you live in apartments, they say, ‘We’re gonna cram eight people into two bedrooms,’” mother of transferring junior Jonathan Quinn said. “Oh, that sounds like fun. It’s just crazy.” “RAs also have roommates, where feasible,” Garvin said. “So students are definitely crowded in, but we are anticipating cancellations that will give us some flexibility of relocating students around.” Jason Nevinger, President of the Pennsylvania Association of College Admission Counseling (PACAC), says that statewide, the related “yield” factor of admissions---the percentage of admitted applicants who ultimately enroll---
has become more difficult for admissions offices to project. “You have to look at all of those applicants and then project through, ‘Okay, how many should we admit?’” Nevinger said. “And I think what you find over the last few years is that the predictability of what that yield percentage should be is maybe coming off askew from what it has been recently for a number of reasons.” For one, students are applying to more schools at a time. About 25 percent of applicants now apply to seven or more institutions. In the case of a large state system like Penn State, freshman applicants--most of whom want to attend University Park--are encouraged to choose second- and third-choice campuses. In a 2011 Quality Advocates meeting offered through Planning and Institutional Assessment, Rohrbach said that Penn State is accepting more students who “qualify,” but cannot be given admission to their first choice campus. Yet the 2013 “Penn State Up Close” publication says that “entrance difficulty is based partly on demand.” U.S. News and World Report classifies Penn State’s admissions process as “rolling.” Though counselors in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions would not comment on past or current admission practices, Robert Pangborn, Vice President and Dean of Undergraduate Education, said at the Quality Advocates meeting the Central
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Enrollment Management Group oversees the enrollment management projection process all year long and begin to project enrollment three years in advance. High school demographics and campus capacity are two of the factors
“RAs also have roommates, where feasible. So students are definitely crowded in, but we are anticipating cancellations that will give us some flexibility of relocating students around.” Jennifer Garvin
considered. “Decreasing high school graduation rates in Pennsylvania and increasing numbers of out-of-state applicants are uniquely affecting the demographics of Pennsylvania college admissions,” Nevinger said. Rohrbach and Pangborn addressed this trend the Quality Advocates meeting: currently graduation rates have decreased almost 30 percent in some parts of the state. Eighty-five percent of first-year classes at University Park enroll up to 50 students. Twelve courses have over 400 students. Large Penn State classes like the 230-student Survey of Telecommunications class utilized iClickers for the first time in Spring 2012. The small wands are grading and attendance-taking tools for professors. They provide anonymous interaction for students, who electronically submit answers to multiple choice questions on large projector screens in the theaterstyle rooms of the Forum building. The iClickers were also used in the University of Arizona’s 600-1,200 student “mega classes.”
Four essays were still assigned over the course of the semester, but because Professor Matt Jackson, Head of the Telecommunications Department, had only one teaching assistant, students like sophomore Sarah Bell complained that “it took weeks---sometimes a month” to get grades back. Kelly Bedard found in her 2005 study that as class size goes up, student satisfaction goes down. Over a period of seven years, Bedard tracked student evaluations of economics courses at the University of California-Santa Barbara and found that the same professor would get lower marks when his or her class got bigger. A 1987 University of Washington study determined that student motivation suffers when students felt anonymous to their professor or to each other. “Central Enrollment Management Group in consultation with campuses determines the enrollment targets for first-year students at each campus to provide a quality academic education and experience,” Rohrbach said. The influx of freshman hasn’t created a buffer against tuition increases. In fact, both in-state and out-of-state students are seeing a tuition hike this fall. Penn State undergraduates from Pennsylvania are seeing a bigger jump than undergraduates from out of state: in-state students are paying 2.9 percent more than they did last year, while out-of-state students are paying an additional 2.4 percent. At a news conference on the $4.3 billion budget approval, Penn State President Rodney Erickson noted, “It represents the lowest rate of tuition increase since 1967.” He also announced in May that Penn State’s target for undergraduate enrollment was 7,200 students, and there was a 6 percent increase in acceptances for Fall 2012. “The predictions for the final enrollments of new first-year baccalaureate students for summer and fall indicate that we should come very close to the goal of 7,400, a modest increase over the original target of 7,200 for University Park.” Erickson said.