'It’s a community that comes together to change'
CMU’s enrollment increases for the first time in a decade
The official Central Michigan University Seal during the Fall semester. (CM Life | Blace Carpenter)
According to preliminary enrollment data, Central Michigan University increased its general enrollment for the first time in over a decade. This semester, 14,466 students are enrolled, an increase of 55 students from last fall’s enrollment of 14,411 students.
Executive Director of Admissions Bob Garcia said the increase is due to teamwork across all of CMU’s departments.
“I think it's important for whenever I talk about us growing enrollment, it’s never what the admissions office is doing or what the university’s communications are doing,” Gracia said. “It’s a community, and it’s a community that comes together to change.”
CMU has seen an increase in both its freshman and transfer enrollment for the third year in a row this semester. With a freshman class size of 2,233, this is a 9% increase from last year’s enrollment and the largest class since 2019, which totaled to 2,518 students.
Transfer enrollment had an increase of 50 students. Garcia said that the university is working with several community colleges through programs such as the Michigan Transfer Agreement (MTA) and offers students scholarships that are competitive with other institutions.
“We know that our students tend to come here because they are looking for ‘What am I going to study and what’s my career going to be?’” Garcia said. “So, we want to look at, ‘What are our outcomes?’”
For the 2023-2024 year, CMU awarded 4,162 degrees, an increase of 40 from the previous year.
CMU also saw an increase in student credit hours for the first time in over a decade, with 178,075 credit hours. The average for students this semester is around 12 credit hours, the minimum requirement for full-time undergraduates.
University President Bob Davies said that while general enrollment is undeniably important to the institution, credit hours are what fund the college.
“The credit hour is the revenue-generating part of the university,” Davies said. “It’s also the efficiency and effectiveness part of the institution as well … There is room and board and various things along those lines, and that truly is driven by headcount, but the primary general fund is driven by the credit hour production.”
In the 2015 Fall semester, CMU reported 308,034 student credit hours. Davies said one contributing factor to the roughly 42% decrease is dual enrollment.
“We typically used to be to say, ‘Ok, if we admit a student we have them for x number of years and they graduate, they’re going to take 125 on average credits,’” Davies said. “And you can kind of count of that revenue. Well, a lot of them now are coming in with 40 credits and so they’re going to be taking 80 credits from us … So it does have an impact on the financials. It does have an impact on the services that we can offer.”
When it comes to retention rates and bringing new students to campus, Davies said there is a balance that the university wants to keep. One point Davies has stressed about the increase is that CMU didn’t lower its admission requirements.
“There are universities that have increased the number of students coming into the institution, but they have done so by decreasing the academic standards,” Davies said. "So what has happened subsequently? The retention rates go down. So again, it's about having more students who are good students, who are going to be successful at CMU and being able to retain them.”
According to Garcia, a main goal for the university is to increase the freshman class by 2% to 4% each year and bring the retention rate to 75%, which is based on the prior year’s freshman class.
“What we want to do is continue to have these incremental gains year over year, and see where it can take us,” Garcia said. “Now if we have another year where we grow by 9%, wonderful. We’re not going to be upset about that.”
