FAMU’s enrollment in Fall 2015 dropped to 9,920 (down from
10,233 in Fall 2014) under President Elmira Mangum. That loss of 313 students,
with the rest of the student losses from that year, cost FAMU $9M+ in tuition
and fees.
FAMU expected to lose about another $10.5M in tuition and
fees due to its projected enrollment of 9,000, a loss of 920 students, in
2016-2017.
But Mangum told the FAMU Board of Trustees (BOT) during her final
president’s report on September 15 that the university had 9,612 students for
Fall 2016. That’s more than originally projected, but still a loss of 308
students from the previous fall.
“Every 100 students means a million dollars out of our
budget,” BOT Chair Kelvin Lawson said in an interview with the Capitol News
Service.
Mangum defended the enrollment decline as being necessary in
order to increase the quality of the students FAMU has.
“Quantity does have to be sacrificed in order to get
quality,” she told the BOT.
The enrollment trends at North Carolina A&T University
(NCA&T), which replaced FAMU as the largest single campus historically
black college or university in 2014-2015, show that the claim Mangum made isn’t true.
NCA&T Chancellor Harold Martin hasn’t placed quality
aside as he has expanded enrollment. He reversed the school’s decline in
students in Fall 2014 after two straight years of falling enrollment caused by
the federal financial aid program overhaul. The freshman, first-time student
classes that Martin enrolled in Fall 2014 and Fall 2015 both had an
average high school GPA of 3.28.
Martin has increased NCA&T’s overall enrollment again in
Fall 2016 and brought in a freshman class with an average high school GPA of 3.48
An effort to recruit a bigger number of college-ready
students doesn’t mean that enrollment has to decline. A university can recruit
college-ready students and grow its enrollment at the same time. No one has to
tell Martin that because he has strong enrollment management skills, something Mangum failed to develop during her presidency.