WIU’s official enrollment down, administration striving for turnaround

Western Illinois University’s official headcount this fall is 5,337. That’s a drop of 995 from last fall, when enrollment was 6,332.

Justin Schuch, WIU’s Vice President for Student Success, said the senior class is the largest one among current students, so there might be a dip in enrollment again next fall. But he said the administration is striving to reverse course.

“We hope that the campus should really sit around 6,000 [to] 6,500. When you think about personnel power, our facilities, that’s the number the institution should be at,” Schuch said.

“While we would love to be higher than that, and we will certainly strive, a realistic number is more around 6,000 [to] 6,500 for us for the foreseeable future.”

Even though enrollment is down from a year ago, it’s a bit higher than what the administration anticipated a few weeks ago, when it projected a headcount of around 5,100.

Schuch credited three factors:

• The state’s ReUp Education program, which reaches out to former students who have paused their studies and encourages them to reenroll
• WIU’s use of the company Motimatic, which also works to bring back students who have paused their studies
• A higher than anticipated retention rate of sophomore to junior students

Schuch believes WIU’s future recruitment efforts will also be aided by the hiring of a new assistant vice president of admissions and enrollment support. Richard Toomey will begin work on Oct. 1.

Schuch said Toomey has 31 years of experience in enrollment management and has offered some good ideas already even though he’s not on the payroll yet.

Breaking down the numbers

According to the administration’s data, the Macomb campus total enrollment is 4,786, and there are 551 students on the Quad Cities campus.

Schuch said 2,364 students are taking classes online.

“Many of them are physically either in Macomb or in Moline. It’s really difficult for us to be able to pinpoint this early exactly how many students are fully online and not living on one of our two campuses,” Schuch said.

WIU has 759 freshmen, 600 sophomores, 997 juniors, 1,520 seniors, and 1,461 graduate students.

3,222 of the students are women, and 2,115 are men.

Schuch said three programs stand out as being the most popular at WIU.

“Law enforcement continues to be a program that our students are interested in. Psychology is also a strong program for both first-year students and transfer students. And agriculture continues to be a very strong program for the institution,” Schuch said. “All three of those, particularly for freshmen and transfer students, are our largest majors.”

He said the university is also receiving more inquiries about its performing arts programs. The state is in the home stretch of building the Goldfarb Center for Performing Arts on the Macomb campus.

“I would hope by this time next fall we see an increase in interest in those programs,” he said.

Schuch said international student enrollment is down overall, and especially so with international graduate students. He’s reluctant to speculate on why the numbers are down, but said WIU will keep working to attract international students.

“Not only do we have a great academic experience for our international students, but being able to have multiple views and personalities and backgrounds on campus benefits everyone,” Schuch said. “We will continue to recruit heavily overseas.”

Changing times

Schuch said the university cannot rely solely on recruiting high school students because the number of high school graduates is declining.

He said another challenging trend since the COVID pandemic is that graduating high school students are choosing either the largest institutions or those closest to their home.

Schuch said as a smaller institution, WIU tells prospective students that they won’t feel like a number on campus and they will get to know their faculty.

Despite the drop in enrollment, Schuch senses a positive vibe at WIU.

“Every single one of our opening events had more students attending than previous years. It’s a different feeling on campus, truly, as students are interacting with each other,” Schuch said. “It’s just a good feeling on campus.”

He believes WIU can build on that.

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