ENROLLMENT Summer 2009 enrollment – 5,504 Summer 2010 enrollment – 5,851Source: UTC
Summer school enrollment at UTC jumped this year for the first time in recent history, a trend, officials say, being pushed by a change in federal guidelines for financial aid.
And the surprise surge in summer students likely will help the college’s efforts to improve graduation rates and move students through their degrees faster, officials said.
“We really need to get students through and graduated and not have people on the six-year plan,” said Dianne Cox, director of financial aid at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Overall enrollment in the summer terms increased more than 6 percent over last year to total 5,818, records show.
“I think it’s great,” said UTC Provost Phil Oldham. “We haven’t experiences significant growth in summer school. … We want to encourage more people to go.”
In previous years, many students have shied away from taking summer classes because the courses weren’t covered by federal or state financial aid programs.
Travis Stroud, a senior English major at UTC who took two summer classes this year, said the availability of some financial aid for the summer term will allow him to make up for time he lost when he changed his major a few years ago. He’ll be able to finish school in 51/2 years instead of six.
“It will be good to finally move on,” Stroud said. “(Financial aid) allowed me to go to summer school. I wouldn’t have had that money. I have to help my parents and make car payments.”
Until this year, the federal needs-based Pell grant program provided aid for only two semesters per year. Pell now includes coverage for a third semester if students are enrolled full time in both the fall and spring semesters.
Students receiving Pell grants in the summer increased from 104 last year to 690 this summer. The number of summer financial aid applicants went up from 882 last year to 1,117 this year, records show.
“It was very hard this year,” Cox said. “Processing summer financial aid is very manual because there are so many different terms. It was very laborious.”
Those numbers will continue to spike if legislation is changed to allow students to apply their Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship to a third semester per year.
Last year, legislation was proposed and supported by UTC officials that would allow students at a four-year school taking between six and eight credit hours during the summer to be eligible for a $1,000 award from the lottery scholarship; students taking between nine and 11 hours would be eligible for $1,500; and students taking 12 or more hours would receive $2,000.
The bill never made it out of committee because of growing concern about a lottery deficit.
Offering the lottery scholarship year round would increase spending by $4.9 million in fiscal year 2010, according to a Tennessee General Assembly Fiscal Review Committee report.
Still, UTC officials say universities have the capacity to grow summer school classes but will not be able to without a change to HOPE scholarship policy.
“Summer school is underutilized, and there are fixed costs there, regardless,” Oldham said. “It’s a much more cost-effective way of educating students.”
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