In the press release announcing the faculty cuts announced last week, William Crothers also announced 736 new students, 604 freshmen and 132 transfers, are attending Ashland University this semester. The release reports the 11-student increase as “stable undergraduate enrollment.”

With the buzz surrounding last year’s tuition reset, hopes were certainly higher anecdotally, and Scott Van Loo, the vice president of enrollment management and marketing, was reporting a large increase in enrollments throughout the semester.

“We watch all those indicators and we were, as late as middle-March to late March, we were over 100 deposits ahead of the prior year,” Van Loo said. “That’s a very strong indicator. The class was tracking very strong.”

In April, these projections began to falter as students began requesting enrollment deposit refunds. 

By the final enrollment census taken this semester, the incoming freshman class that had been over 100 deposits ahead of the prior year ended up with 17 fewer students than the previous academic year.

Van Loo said a variety of factors could have caused the shift, but that it is impossible to predict all levels of decision-making.

“I’d like to think that we can predict all levels of decision making but we can’t,” Van Loo said. “Some years institutions can see an extra two to three percent matriculate over the prior year and they can’t really explain it. 

In 2013 we had one of our higher yield and matriculation percentages than in past years. Last year we went back to where we normally had been which is around 26-27 percent of our admit pool. I can’t say that I know with any certainty what it might have been.”

The drop in enrollment deposits occurred while national media outlets, such as Slate and PolicyMic, wrote articles critically examining Ashland University’s value to students. 

Although expectations were quite high for this freshman class, transfer numbers did rise, and Van Loo is evaluating the marketing techniques for incoming freshmen.

“I would say that my expectations were to be beyond 604 freshmen and it didn’t happen,” he said, “but the unanticipated consequence, it was difficult to model but we thought it would be effective, was an increase in transfers which we certainly did see. We went from 104 to 132 so we increased 28 but we were down 17 for a net gain of 11. So we look at that and you go ‘What can we do next year? What did we not do as effectively working with incoming freshmen?’”

Early indicators are positive again for the university, with a 10 percent increase in applications to date. 

“We’ve been mobilizing to build a broader funnel and we keep working towards that,” Van Loo said. “Now it’s trying to drive more in and make students more interested and strengthening our message, strengthening how we communicate who we are.”

Although enrollment may not have skyrocketed as optimistically predicted, Van Loo said even seeing stable undergraduate enrollment is evidence of an improved marketing effort.

“Higher education is a competitive environment right now,” he said. “We are seeing a declining number of high school students graduating in the state of Ohio, we are seeing that happen in our contiguous states. In order for AU, which is 90% dependent on Ohio for enrollments, for us to continue to see stable and strong enrollment, we have to continue to do things better and we have to continue to communicate more effectively. We have to continue to highlight and showcase those areas of excellence in the institution.”