Enrollment plunge hurt FAMU’s classroom usage rate

A recent audit demonstrated yet another lingering effect from FAMU’s enrollment decline between 2005 and 2007.

In April, Florida’s Office of Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPAGA) reported that state universities only used their classrooms 56.1 percent of the time from Monday through Friday. The data covered Spring 2008.

FAMU had the lowest classroom utilization rate, which was 40.3 percent. That’s down from 49.5 percent in Spring 2005 when FAMU was actually ahead of UWF, FAU, and FIU.

The biggest reason for FAMU’s lower classroom usage is its lower enrollment. Back in 2005, Interim President Castell Bryant destroyed the university’s recruitment program and sent enrollment into a nosedive. FAMU fell from 13,070 students in Fall 2004 to 11,567 in Fall 2008.

The current student body is smaller than FAMU’s classroom capacity. In 1997, former President Frederick S. Humphries and then-Provost James Ammons announced their goal of expanding FAMU’s student body to at least 15,000 by 2003. After the Board of Regents approved the plan, FAMU based its classroom building construction on that anticipated number.

When Ammons took over as president in 2007, he recommitted FAMU to getting its enrollment up to 15,000, the number it was supposed to reach years ago.

Another factor behind the low classroom utlization rate is the fact that most FAMU students take smaller course loads when college expenses rise. FAMU's median family income is only $30,000 per year. Pell Grants and financial aid have not kept up with tuition and fee hikes.

The OPPAGA report added that FAMU faces certain physical barriers that hurt its classroom utilization rate. The auditors wrote that many of FAMU’s classrooms “are older and can accommodate a maximum of 35 students.” That means larger classes must meet somewhere else.

The auditors actually complimented the Ammons administration for making more cost-effective use of its classrooms by moving “to larger class sizes and using space not coded as classrooms on the inventory to teach larger groups of students.” They also said that FAMU is among the schools that plan to “renovate some of their smaller classrooms to better match the needs for classroom space.”