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08 May 2012

Georgia State University & College?

What is going on here? The oft repeated narrative here at Georgia College has been that the University System of Georgia Board of Regents has allowed us to cap growth at the undergraduate level because of our distinction as the sole public liberal arts institution in the system; in order to generate revenue, however, we are expected to grow at the graduate level.

SOURCE DATA: USG Research and Policy Analysis


These data do not match that narrative.

Between the spring of 2001 and the spring of 2012, there has been an average increase of 152 undergraduate students per year (an average of 3% growth per year); there has been no significant change in graduate enrollment over this same period.

In the past, I have been outspoken in my opposition to the "growth at the grad level" model since I assumed that continuous growth at the grad level at a liberal arts institution was untenable. After all, graduate enrollment would overtake undergraduate enrollment at some point, seriously calling into question the liberal arts designation, but what the data actually show is that we're not using that graduate growth model at all. We've been growing our undergraduate population.

A colleague suggested that perhaps this had to do with a more recent change in policy that isn't reflected in the earlier data points so I checked. None of the near term changes in undergraduate enrollment are significant until we go back to 2007, and the near term graduate enrollment changes are all insignificant. In fairness to the administration, it looks like--perhaps--growth at the undergraduate level stopped in 2010; there has not been a corresponding change at the grad level over that period. We'll have to see what happens in the coming years.

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