Godzilla hovers over campus Tuesday announcing the "monster" career fair coming up Oct. 20 at the Bob Devaney Sports Center.

Improved Retention Figures Good News

Enrollment Trends Show New Admissions Criteria Having Desired Outcome

By Kim Hachiya, Public Relations

University officials are elated over a trend that has emerged from this year's enrollment statistics - more students are returning for their sophomore year, boosting retention to more than 80 percent.

And while total numbers of students are still lower than a few years ago, indications are strong that the numbers will rebound soon.

Jim Griesen, vice chancellor for student affairs, said the enrollment roller coaster was not unexpected.

"The good news is that our implementation of the new undergraduate admissions standards is working exactly as we'd expected it to," he said. "We experienced about a 500 student reduction in our freshman class last year. But, this year we actually regained close to 200 of that drop in just one year. And this is the normal pattern that institutions experience as they strengthen their admissions standards. You have a precipitous decline to begin with and then in about three years you climb back up to where you initially were, only with a much better-prepared student body."

Griesen said the higher retention figures reflect the academic success of freshmen.

"It's clear that our higher admissions standards are working as reflected in the retention rates of freshman. We actually started to see some of the increase in quality of our entering classes even before they were strictly placed into effect. As early as '95-'96, we found that we increased from a traditional retention rate from freshman to sophomore year of about 75 percent to 78 percent. Then, students from the class that entered in the fall of '96 returned at a rate of 79 percent. And, the student sfrom last fall who were the first class fully admitted under the new admissions standards, returned at a rate of about 81 percent this year. And, that's very much what we had hoped to achieve when we implemented these standards."

In his State of the University Address Aug. 21, Chancellor James Moeser announced a goal of 80 percent retention within five years.

"It looks like we have already achieved that - and that we need to re-set the goal," the chancellor said. "This is good news."

The University of Nebraska central administration announced systemwide figures on Sept. 18. They showed an overall decrease of 2.5 percent over all four NU campuses.

Headcount for the Lincoln campus shows a decrease of 419 students (1.8 percent) over last year. Enrollment this term is 22,408. Undergraduate enrollment declined 1.5 percent (266 students) and graduate enrollment dropped 4.3 percent (180 students). Law and professional programs increased 6.4 percent (27 students). Enrollment at the Nebraska School of Technical Agriculture, administered by the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, declined by 16 students (5.8 percent); NTCA has 277 students this term.

Undergraduate enrollments were up in the colleges of architecture, business administration, engineering and technology, fine and performing arts, and journalism and mass communications. The colleges of agricultural sciences and natural resources, arts and sciences, human resources and family sciences, teachers and continuing studies showed declines in enrollment.

Griesen said deeper analysis of the numbers reveals that the Lincoln campus is actually gaining in the number of new undergraduate students. New freshman enrollments are up approximately 5 percent, he said, much as officials expected after the initial drop when the new standards were implemented. New undergraduate transfer students are up more than 2 percent. I expect that to grow in the coming year because many of the students who were deferred as to admission to UNL last year went to community colleges and we expect that at the end of a two year period they'll start transferring back to UNL in greater rates

"We expected that it would take three years after the year of implementation to get back to the level of new freshmen enrollments we had in 1996-97, but that those who come to UNL are now better prepared to succeed," he said.

Griesen said a number of factors affect enrollment.

The strong economy and the exceptionally low unemployment rate, particularly in Nebraska, induces some students to take jobs rather than continue their education, Griesen said. And the Asian currency crisis has reduced foreign student enrollments.

Because of the implementation of new admissions standards last year, the university is dealing with cumulative effect of a small class last year.

"Last year we were down 500 freshmen, which means that we have approximately 400 fewer sophomores from that class, plus we're still down about 300 from where we traditionally have been in the freshman class, so the cumulative effect tends to be more like 700, and that shows up in an overall reduction particularly when coupled with the fact that the strong economy is causing some decline in our graduate and part-time student enrollments," he said.

NU Program Offers Economic Assessment to Rural Communities

By Dan Holder, IANR news

Economic changes hit smaller Nebraska communities just as hard as their urban counterparts, but large cities usually have more resources for evaluating potential outcomes and impacts.

A new University of Nebraska program offers those small communities forecasting help.

ACRE, Assessing Changes in Rural Economies, provides consulting services to local leaders trying to estimate the economic impact of a new commercial or government project without the typically expensive consulting costs.

"The main focus of what we're trying to do is to help communities better understand what happens to their communities when economic change occurs," said Eric Tiritilli, the ACRE program manager based in Lincoln. He and Garth Taylor, an agricultural economist and community development specialist at NU's Panhandle Research and Extension Center at Scottsbluff, make up the ACRE staff.

The Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources program is offered through NU's Center for Rural Community Revitalization and Development. It was developed by the Rural Policy Research Institute, a consortium of NU, Iowa State and the University of Missouri that analyzes the rural impact of public policy issues.

For many towns, economic change produces indirect effects that aren't immediately obvious, Tiritilli explained. The ACRE program is designed to show communities what those secondary consequences could be. Those economic changes include a business expansion or contraction, the location of a government facility or measuring an industry's relative importance to an area.

"That's our main focus, helping communities think through these complex economic issues in a format that's easily accessible," Tiritilli said.

When a community signs up with ACRE, working through local NU Cooperative Extension educators, IANR consultants analyze a county's economic profile, measuring tax revenues, population, employment and government expenditures. Communities pay for ACRE's services.

The consultants combine this numerical information with input from local meetings to produce a usable, readable report that analyzes the fiscal impact associated with proposed changes. Data from several counties also can be analyzed for regional projects.

"Our main focus is trying to help communities think through these complex economic issues in a format that is easily accessible, one that they can look at and understand where the numbers are coming from and how we got those numbers," Tiritilli said.

"We didn't want to come in as researchers from Lincoln and say here's the answer to your question.' While a lot of what we do is quantitatively and mathematically based, an equally important component is the participation with the local community. They're involved in the process from the beginning to the very end," he said.

Taylor explained that, in a four-step interactive process, ACRE analyzes the economic issues, holds local meetings to check the data, evaluates possible scenarios caused by the decision under study, and holds another round of local meetings to discuss possible solutions to future problems.

The ACRE program is just getting started, and has done two pilot projects, in Antelope and Cheyenne counties. It uses a computer program developed at the Rural Policy Research Institute to measure the impact of economic development on rural communities. Tiritilli customized the general program so it's applicable to Nebraska.

"One of the real big benefits of this is that we can do it on a relatively low-cost basis, and in a way that can get the community involved with the program so they don't think it's outside researchers coming in telling them what's best for their community," Tiritilli said. "Our goal is to get out there and help communities that traditionally have not had this resource available to them."

The program is funded by NU's Center for Rural Community Revitalization and Development and grants from the Rural Policy Research Institute.