St. Joe’s failed to meet its target enrollment of 1,150 first-year students this year, which reflects a growing nationwide trend of decreasing enrollment in colleges and universities.

The class of 2023 currently consists of 1,103 students, 47 students short of its target. Enrollment is fluid from May 1 until the official count is completed in early October, according to Karen Pellegrino, vice president for enrollment management.

“We always lose a few students during the first weeks of the semester for a variety of reasons—health issues, financial concerns, etc.,” Pellegrino said in an email to The Hawk.

The university’s target enrollment is set by the university’s executive committee, according to Maureen Mathis, director of undergraduate admissions.

Pellegrino said limiting a class to 1,150 students is ideal for being more selective in the admissions process. The university’s acceptance rate was over 85% five years ago, almost 10 percentage points higher than this year’s 76.3%.

“Students are attracted to the most selective schools,” Pellegrino said. “We’ve seen an increase in the academic quality of our students as measured by things like their GPA in high school and the quality of the program they’re taking.”

The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center is a non-profit organization that collects enrollment and degree data from 3,600 colleges and universities.

The NSC Research Center reported a 2.6% drop in enrollment for Pennsylvania colleges and universities from spring 2018 to spring 2019, according to Mikyung Ryu, director of research publications at the NSC Research Center.

Ryu said the drop can be attributed to a lower high school graduation rate nationwide.

“People are not having babies at the same rate, and the immigration population is not growing at the same pace,” Ryu said. “It’s multiple factors combined.”

According to both Ryu and Pellegrino, while the population of 18 year olds is declining nationally, that decline is most significant in the northeast and midwest, and in Pennsylvania, in particular.

The fact that the majority of St. Joe’s students come from Pennsylvania and New Jersey complicates the university’s recruiting efforts.

“It certainly makes us somewhat vulnerable,” Pellegrino said. “Having so many students from two of the states that are going to experience the most significant demographic declines in the next 10 years, we’d like to see more diversity in our student body in terms of where students are coming from.”

Not meeting target enrollment goals ultimately affects an institution’s bottom line, Ryu said.

“No matter what type of institutions they are, the enrollment is one of the major revenue sources,” Ryu said. “So when enrollments are not growing, when they are declining, you can expect it will have a major impact on institutions financially. But in our data, it is beyond our capacity to pinpoint exactly to what extent that would have been affected financially.”

For Pellegrino, the admissions team is determined to “work harder” next year.

“At this point, we didn’t reach our enrollment target, but that means we also saved some money in terms of financial aid, so there’s some give and take in the budget,” Pellegrino said. “We’re not going to abandon our goal because we do feel that’s the right size for us to be.”

Pellegrino said efforts to meet the enrollment goal next year include focusing on recruiting throughout New England, Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia as well as diversifying the school’s population racially and socioeconomically.

The St. Joe’s admissions team also works closely with marketing and communications to recruit potential students who are diverse in their geographic, socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, Pellegrino said.

Part of these recruitment efforts includes a university-wide rebrand, beginning with a website redesign that launched on Oct. 7. According to St. Joe’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Marie Williams, the website is being used as a platform to recruit potential students by highlighting student experiences and successes.

“With lower income demographics and the practicality of an education, we need to keep hammering home the great storytelling with those outcomes,” Williams said. “We do have those outcomes. They exist here.”

But Williams said liberal arts institutions present a marketing challenge.

“The liberal arts have been under attack for a while,” Williams said. “Gen Z is the generation coming up, and while all the research suggests they have a lot in common with millennials, [their] hyperfocus on financial stability was something that came up a lot in the research.”

Pellegrino said St. Joe’s is confronting these challenges “head on.”

“These are challenging times for admission offices, but St. Joe’s as an institution is really well positioned to tackle those,” Pellegrino said.