Can UT handle increased enrollment?

Decreasing enrollment may be a great sign of regional economic recovery but that has consequences for schools like the University of Toledo.

In October 2015, the Ohio Department of Higher Education published a report showing a negative 11 percent change in UT’s enrollment between 2009 and 2014. As expected, the administration felt the financial impact and responded with a 60-day restriction on filling up employee vacancies, including faculty vacancy positions.

The public administration program, for example, suspended its admissions in May 2014 because it lacked the required number of full-time professors needed to maintain its accreditation. That’s only one example of the effect of the employment freeze.

However, one of the first actions of UT’s new president, Sharon Gaber, was to extend the 60-day hiring restriction to an 8-month embargo on employment starting January 1, 2016.

This thinking was to “grow our way out of these financial challenges by recruiting and retaining more students,” according to a letter Gaber had written to the hiring managers at UT.

The official fall 2016 enrollment numbers have yet to be released, however, a sampling of student perception suggests an increase to the number of students on campus.

We celebrate this great development but also question the extent of our preparedness to contain the adverse effects of an increased enrollment especially in the backdrop of the hiring freeze, retirements and sabbaticals that have deprived departments of needed professors.

A good test of an institution’s quality is a measure of its pro-activeness in dealing with emergencies. It is hard to say if we were prepared for this situation. Or we were probably just not ready yet for the profit of our investments on enrollment.

We see an increasing trend in use of administrator-instructors in our classrooms and while this may be great for students to learn hands-on from practitioners, it is not clear how much of this is simply a reflection of our lack of preparation.

Our mainstream professors have also stepped in for colleagues on sabbaticals as well as for open classes without professors and emergency situations. Classes were either canceled or rescheduled the Friday before school started, course contents were changed and impromptu classes were opened for registration that hurried students to sign up before the caps were reached.

Students just want to graduate on time with their programs.

We worry that the results of this, if it were to be a continuing trend, would be large class sizes and burnt-out professors. But this is what happens when important course and classroom changes were not clearly communicated to students, making it a common sight when both students and professors were in the wrong lecture rooms.

We think the university departments could have done better with communicating schedule changes to students in time. Departmental websites were barely used and are rarely updated, especially not during the week it was most needed. But importantly, it could have done better with the faculty hiring situation. We are not saying that the university should continue hiring professors en bloc. However, a more targeted approach to enforcing the hiring freeze would have identified departments with higher number of faculty vacancies due to retirements or sabbaticals and make the moratorium flexible towards such departments.

In the end though, we applaud the administration’s efforts to increasing enrollment, improving our fiscal health and for ensuring that our University of Toledo continues to provide quality education to as many people possible. We are worried however about the unforeseen consequences such a change can come along with and hope that the University works to maintain organization as it continues to grow.