<p>Sounds like colleges are growing in numbers in spite of economy</p>
<p>** Packed classes catch colleges by surprise – baltimoresun.com **
[Packed</a> classes catch colleges by surprise – baltimoresun.com](<a href=“http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-md.enrollment21sep21,0,2173364.story]Packed”>http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-md.enrollment21sep21,0,2173364.story)</p>
<p>September 21, 2009</p>
<p>The freshmen arrived in a flood, forcing the Johns Hopkins University to reopen a defunct residence hall, lease a nearby inn and create new sections of popular math and science courses.</p>
<p>Those might sound like steps required in a robust economy, when a $54,500 annual price tag would be little impediment to students seeking a prestigious education. The twist is that all of it happened in the past three weeks.</p>
<p>Conventional wisdom held that the deep recession might push students away from expensive private schools such as Hopkins to lower-priced alternatives. Instead, the university is coping with a freshman boom.</p>
<p>A projected class of 1,235 is actually a class of 1,350 and, instead of bracing for bleak revenue numbers, Hopkins officials are scouring every nook and cranny for places to put their newest customers.</p>
<p>“It’s good news in the sense that if we couldn’t hit our target, this is better than being way below it,” said Bill Conley, dean of enrollment and academic services. “It’s a good problem to have.”</p>
<p>Hopkins is only the most dramatic example of a trend that has surprised colleges and universities across the state. Despite the recession and high tuitions at many institutions, students appear as determined to attend college as ever.</p>
<p>Admissions officers said all summer that they had little idea what they might see when students arrived for the fall semester. Hitting bull’s-eye on the projected size of a freshman class is an inexact science in the best of times. And given the volatile economy, a rash of last-minute no-shows seemed possible.</p>
<p>“This was, in my 10 years working in the public sector, one of the most difficult years to project enrollment,” said Brian Hazlett, director of admissions at Towson University.</p>
<p>** Most colleges built more no-shows than usual into their projections. This measure is known as melt in the admissions world. [/m] But a funny thing happened when local campuses greeted their new classes in late August - there was little or no melt. The kids who said they were coming in the spring actually showed up.</p>
<p>Admissions counselors said the resilience of student commitments shows that families were willing to forgo other expenses to invest in the long-term payoff of college and that they wanted a bit of certainty in uncertain times.</p>
<p>At Towson, the freshman class is about 1 percent larger than projected. That’s not an unusual variation, but in a year when admissions officers worried that class sizes would skew low, it’s a positive sign, Hazlett said.</p>
<p>“We see it as evidence that students and families understand that they made a good buy,” he said. “Private schools were out there offering a lot of scholarship money, but we really were not impacted by that.”</p>
<p>** At the University of Maryland, College Park a projected class of 4,000 came in at 4,200. ** That was largely because fewer students changed their minds over the summer than usual, said Britt Reynolds, director of undergraduate admissions.</p>
<p>“In hindsight, we can look at it and say that maybe people wanted fewer risks in the middle of a recession,” he said. “They wanted to pick something, stick with it and bring some certainty to their lives.”</p>
<p>Reynolds said it’s not unusual to overshoot or undershoot projections by a few hundred and said the campus can absorb the extra students with little difficulty.</p>
<p>“I take this as good news overall,” he said. “You never want to be too much under or over your projection, but people tended to move back to education in this time, and that’s a good thing for us.”</p>
<p>Loyola projected an incoming class of 950 students and ended up with 972, seeing little evidence of late-summer melt because of the volatile economy. After over-enrolling by 80 last year, Loyola did not want to overshoot by so many again, so officials are satisfied with the number.</p>
<p>“It was very hard to have a complete pulse on the numbers this year,” said Elena Hicks, director of undergraduate admissions at Loyola. “We came in exactly where we wanted to be, so we’re happy.”</p>
<p>When Hopkins officials devised enrollment projections in March, they expected about 1,205 acceptances from the students they admitted and figured they would fill the other 30 slots from the wait list. Because of the recession, they figured students who did not apply for financial aid or applied and were rejected would enroll at lower rates than usual. Those students, who would be faced with paying the full price of a Hopkins education, seemed the most likely to look for cheaper alternatives.</p>
<p>“That’s the very group that confounded us,” Conley said. “They yielded much higher than expected.”</p>
<p>Hopkins officials aren’t sure why this happened. But Conley said the students that surprised them tended to come from families with long histories of attending private colleges. “We think that even with the financial sacrifices required, it was hard for them to walk away.”</p>
<p>Conley also speculated that Hopkins’ reputation as a rigorous academic school helped it in a time when waste seems unpalatable.</p>
<p>“This is a time when a lot of families want their children at a place where education is serious business,” he said. “That’s what’s going to sell. People are not going to spend $50,000 a year just for their kids to have a good old time.”</p>