Now
77
Fri
93
Sat
79
by Andrew Mobley
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is seeing enrollment numbers increase after years of watching its student body dwindle.
TOPICS:
LITTLE ROCK (KATV) — The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is seeing enrollment numbers increase after years of watching its student body dwindle.
This school year, freshman enrollment is up 33.3 percent, or 203 students, over last year.
Ten years ago, UALR had 8,016 undergraduate students. That number saw a steady decline until the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the university with an even steeper drop in enrollment until, by fall 2023, it had only 5,210 undergrads.
“A lot of that decline was the pandemic from 2019 to 2022,” said Jonathan Coleman, UALR assistant vice chancellor of enrollment management and director of scholarships and financial aid.
But then the tide began to turn in 2023, and this fall, UALR has 5,679 undergrads.
The enrollment increase is in large part thanks to the university's efforts to attract students with generous half-off or full-ride scholarships established in recent years.
“All incoming freshmen are guaranteed to get half off their tuition and fees. That's been a huge boost for our enrollment. In fall of 2023, we launched our Trojan Guarantee Scholarship, which guarantees a tuition and fee-free bachelor's degree for any student who is academic challenge eligible and Pell eligible. So we've kind of built this growth, this rebound on the back of affordability,” Coleman told KATV.
Marketing major Olivia Osborn said her eligibility for the full-ride scholarship was the deciding factor in her choosing UALR.
“They gave me the scholarship, and it was just the most amazing opportunity. So, of course I took it. And really the only reason that I go to UALR is because of the Donaghy Foundation and all of that. So, what they've done is so crazy. And now I get to go to school for basically free,” said Osborn, a UALR junior.
Also boosting UALR's enrollment is its corporate partnership program, which provides lowered tuition rates to employees of participating companies, for example, Amazon.
“We guarantee a 10 percent tuition discount and also a $25 per credit hour book voucher for employees of these companies to come back and take, they can take three hours, six hours, they can go full time,” Coleman said.
But it's not just overall enrollment numbers that reflect UALR's recovery, it's also a shift in the kinds of students it serves.
“We've seen a nearly 90 percent increase in the size of our freshman class over the last few years. We've even seen kind of a shift over the last few years from—we're traditionally a commuter campus with a lot of non-traditional students—we've seen a shift to a more traditional student body. Our freshman class is now larger than our transfer class, which I'm not sure has ever happened here,” Coleman said.
“I'm a commuter too, but I still feel the campus life and like, this, the community that you feel on a college campus that I really didn't expect when I decided to go here,” Osborn said.
