Enrollment at some University of Tennessee and Tennessee Board of Regents schools is a little like Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
When enrollment went up at the state’s 13 community college because of the advent of Gov. Bill Haslam’s Tennessee Promise program, it dropped at some of the public four-year schools.
Tennessee Promise, after all, is a last-dollar program that promises virtually free tuition for two years for freshmen in state community colleges. Such a program naturally attracted both students who otherwise might have attended four-year colleges and students who otherwise might not have attended college at all.
As such, freshman enrollment is down at some four-year schools. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, for instance, has 11,388 students, 282 fewer than it did in the fall of 2014, a 2.4 percent decline.
That’s actually lower than the 3 percent decline that was the average from 2010 to 2013 at four-year public institutions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
But University of Tennessee system President Joe DiPietro seemed surprised about the University of Tennessee at Martin, where early numbers were down around 13 percent.
“None of us are happy about it,” he said. “The UT Martin community understands that everybody’s job is recruiting now.”
While the University of Tennessee at Knoxville was expecting a record freshman class, enrollment at Tennessee Tech fell off by 439 students and Dr. Steve Angle, chancellor of UTC, told the Downtown Chattanooga Rotary Club earlier this month the slight drop at his campus was expected and planned for in the 2016 budget.
It’s a different story at the state’s community colleges, which tallied a 6 percent jump in full-time students, including 20 percent at Motlow State.
Previously announced first-day enrollment figures showed an increase of 400 freshmen from the 2015 high school graduating class at Chattanooga State and a 16-percent increase at Cleveland State.
Since the aim of the Tennessee Promise program, as part of Haslam’s “Drive to 55” initiative, is to boost college graduates in the state from 32 to 55 percent of the population within the next 10 years, all of higher education should be on the same page.
So what declined at some state four-year schools this year may rebound at the same schools in two years and be a catalyst for a stronger state workforce for years to come.