Official enrollment numbers show that Tech has reached record undergraduate enrollment for the 11th consecutive year while graduate enrollment has decreased.
The final count for 2011 enrollment overall is 11,768, a 2 percent increase.
Undergraduate enrollment shows a 5.1 percent increase. There has also been a 9 percent increase in the number of transfer students and a 3.1 percent increase in the number of incoming freshmen.
“I believe that a prospective student really feels that there are a lot of people at TTU that genuinely care about student success when he or she visits TTU,” Alexis Pope, assistant director of Admissions said. “I’m not sure how long we can keep it up, but we’ve managed to do more with less when it comes to informing prospective students about the quality education to be had here at TTU.”
The graduate numbers, however, are down 2.1 percent. This decrease is seen especially in the College of Business and the College of Education.
Although the College of Business overall only lost 2.9 percent of its enrolled students, its graduate program enrollment lost 8.6 percent.
The College of Education lost 4.2 percent of enrolled students. However, the graduate program had a 22.4 percent drop in enrollment numbers.
According to enrollment figures, the education graduate program has 227 fewer students than in 2010.
“The graduate enrollment is down because the College of Education has seen a significant decrease this year,” Francis Otuonye, associate vice president of Research and Graduate Studies, said.
Otuonye said three main factors lead to the decrease in the College of Education. The first is a change the state made in the Institutional Leadership Program, so that many students do not have the credentials to get in. The second factor is that the assistantship programs does not have enough money.
Finally, the local economy is down and professionals with a bachelor’s degree who have a job do not want to take out more loans to pay for a master’s degree.
