Summer Session hopes to rebound from enrollment slump

Administrators are scrambling for ways to reverse the slipping undergraduate enrollment in the Tufts Summer Session as summer registration enters its second month.

Fewer Tufts undergrads have taken summer courses at Tufts each year since 1998. According to the Tufts Fact Book, enrollment was 1,587 in 1998 and had decreased by 26.3 percent by 2003. Over the same period, full-time undergraduate enrollment increased by 2.3 percent.

The Fact Book is issued each year by Tufts' Office of Institutional Research.

Summer Session Manager Sean Recroft hopes that a market research project in conjunction with Institutional Research will result in new, more effective promotional strategies. Summer Session market research currently examines the ease of the enrollment procedure, the effectiveness of Summer Session office publications, and how the idea of staying at Tufts for the summer has been communicated to students.

"We didn't have good research before, but we're building data now," Recroft said.

The sluggish state of the national economy over the past few years may be partly to blame for the enrollment decline, according to Recroft. He said that students are more likely to look for summer jobs than spend money going to school.

"When the economy isn't doing so well, there's less discretionary spending in the summer," he said. That discretionary spending includes summer school tuition, which ranges between $1360 and $3120.

For some students, credit load is a bigger factor than money when deciding whether or not to stay at Tufts for the summer. "I am taking summer classes so I don't have to take five credits every semester," sophomore engineering student Ellen Kasson said. "Summer classes will give me a lighter load next year."

Another possible factor is increased competition from state schools, whose summer programs are often less expensive and more convenient for students who wish to stay at home over the summer.

Steve Angelo, the financial manager for the summer sessions program at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), said his office occasionally targets students who attend other universities but who live near UCLA.

"We buy lists from list companies where a [University of California at] Berkley student might have a Los Angeles address," he said. However, Angelo said, most of the effort is focused on students at other California schools. "In general, it's local," he said.

Recroft agreed that cost could be a strong factor in deciding whether to stay at Tufts or attend summer courses nearer to home, but he said "most students who go to Tufts stay at Tufts."

In comparison, undergraduate enrollment in the Summer Studies program at Brown University has remained relatively constant over the last four years, with 319 to 336 Brown undergraduates enrolled in the university's summer courses.

Brown's Dean of Summer and Continuing Studies, Karen Sibley, disagreed with Recroft's theory that a poor economy has a negative effect on summer enrollment. Rather, Sibley said that "students take courses when they have difficulty finding employment."

"We're a little bit insulated from economic concerns by our curriculum," Brown Summer Studies Public Relations Manager Rob Kerr said. Kerr said that the summer program administrators can count on a core group of classes to fill up each year.

Summer Session has also revamped its publications in an effort to attract more students. "We're seeing strong response now," Recroft said. "We have expectations for a strong summer."