The 2002 spring semester at ETSU is seeing a 5 percent increase over last year’s spring semester in both undergraduate and graduate admissions. This increase is the largest that ETSU has seen in several years, according to Dr. Linda Doran, vice provost for academic affairs.

New freshmen, transfers and graduate students have shown the strongest increase and the number of students seeking master’s degrees has increased 10 percent. The overall growth has led to classes that are larger than normal but ETSU is making every effort to “provide full opportunities for students to progress through their degree programs without delay,” Doran said in a press release.

This enrollment increase is the second largest when compared to Tennessee State, Tennessee Tech and Middle Tennessee State University, schools that have similar academic schedules to ETSU.

MTSU leads this group but only by a small margin. Because middle Tennessee is a growing area, the increase at ETSU looks very healthy.

The reasons for the increase are a result of internal changes at ETSU as well as an economic downturn in the Tri-Cities area of Tennessee and Virginia.

The internal changes that have helped boost enrollment come from three areas.

The first change was to take programs off campus, giving access to people in all areas of Virginia and East Tennessee.

Doran said the doctoral degree in educational leadership is now offered in Sevierville, undergraduate programs like nursing were taken to Chattanooga and Cleveland and some of the last two years of the dngineering technology program was taken to Oak Ridge and Knoxville.

Other cities that are hosting ETSU programs are Rogersville and Mountain City, as well as in the traditional areas of Bristol, Greeneville and Kingsport.

Another aspect of off-campus programs are the “cohort” programs, 23 programs that ETSU has started over the last two years.

“Cohort” programs allow students to enter programs as a “class” and stay together as a group through graduation.

Doran said that ETSU had also noticed that some students were attending college year-round, taking summer courses in order to speed up the completion of their degree.

To help students that would be interested in year-round classes, a larger number of more diverse classes are being offered in the summer and are made available to incoming freshman who want to get an early start.

The third area of change was making transferring easier for incoming students.

With about 25 percent of the students at ETSU coming in as transfers, ETSU created curriculum agreements with 15 community colleges in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia area such as Northeast State and Walters State.

“These partnership agreements guide students through the two-year college degree at the community colleges so they can transfer to ETSU without loss of credit,” Doran said

The enrollment increase does create a question of how to manage the funds that are available to ETSU, which Doran says is done through the off-campus courses and larger class sizes.

“We are trying to do more with less,” she said.

While it is hard to predict the effect of the economic downturn on future enrollment increases, these changes should make ETSU look attractive to potential students in the future and continue to boost enrollment.

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