Eastern Philosophy

[October 29th, 2008]

When Eastern Oregon University’s enrollment hit a low in 2005, administrators started battling to reverse the trend, which was threatening the La Grande campus’s overall financial health.

Three years later, they’ve hit upon a novel idea.

According to emails sent this month to Eastern’s faculty, administrators are asking professors to sign up this term for a free “online seminar/conversation series.”

Doing so would boost enrollment numbers, the emails say. That, in turn, would mean increased state funding since aid from Oregon taxpayers to all seven state universities is tied to the credit hours that students accumulate.

Addressing Eastern’s “Campus Community,” provost and vice president for academic affairs Michael Jaeger wrote Oct. 16: “Just a reminder that we will start the first in a series of professional development courses next Monday. You can register for this no-cost course that will help EOU plan for future needs while boosting our fall enrollment numbers.”

Jaeger calls the effort “a carrot to try to get people’s attention,” not a push to increase the state’s financial support for the university. Last year, Eastern’s operational budget of about $30 million included $17 million from the state—more than half. Another $12.8 million came from tuition, according to the Oregon University System.

On Oct. 20, Jaeger sent a second email to remind faculty to sign up for a course called “Issues in Higher Education,” advertised as an opportunity to discuss “emerging issues for colleges and universities including the changing demographic of students, the millennial student, economic trends and implications, leadership and organizational dynamics, and technological change.” Jaeger is listed as the course’s “facilitator.”

“We need a few more folks willing to sign on for the class that starts today,” Jaeger writes. “It is easy. Go to the ED-Bus website at eou.edu/ed/#. At the bottom [of] the page find the link to the registration form. Fill it out, fax to the registrar and you are in. We need a few more people to make a 1 percent difference in head count this fall.”

Asked about the email, Jaeger told WW the impact of enrolling faculty members in college classes was minimal. With 40 participating professors in the one-credit higher-education class, the university added a total of 40 credit hours to its fall enrollment numbers.

Since the university has 3,600 students taking 36,000 credit hours, a boost of 40 represents—as he writes in the emails—about a 1 percent increase in student enrollment. It’s also a 0.1 percent increase in student credit hours, which Jaeger says is “certainly not an enrollment-builder.”

But it’s not as if it doesn’t count, either. Under the Oregon University System’s formula for distributing money to its seven institutions, 40 credit hours would contribute about $4,000.

And that’s just one class.

A representative for James Klein, Southern Oregon University’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, says Southern has never employed this tactic.

And Kyle Janssen, a senior at Eastern, calls what’s going on at the LaGrande school “kind of bizarre.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of that as a strategy,” Janssen says.

Eastern Oregon, the state’s smallest university, is coping with a depressed enrollment as it continues its year-plus search for a new president.

Khosrow Fatemi resigned as president in July 2007. Dixie Lund was then named interim president. In January, she was forced to announce budget cuts of $4 million.

News intern Katie Gilbert contributed to this story.