Initial enrollment drops five points

By Nicole LaPrade

Due to increased entrance requirements, a stronger applicant pool and a reduction in financial aid money available, Santa Clara has seen a drop in the number of students initially admitted who enroll by the May 1 deadline.

According to Charles Nolan, vice provost of enrollment management, the yield, or number of students who initially enroll is lower than in past years, down from 25 percent to about 20 percent.

"We're still waiting for 20 percent of the class to enroll," he said.

He expected there to be a drop of two to three percentage points, citing a stronger applicant pool and less money in the financial aid budget as causes.

But instead, it dropped five.

"When you have stronger students and you're overlapping more and more with Stanford and USC in-state, and Boston College, Notre Dame and Georgetown among the national Catholics, and other highly competitive schools, merit money or merit scholarships play a very large role in trying to attract those students," Nolan said.

"Taking people from the waiting list shows me that we were the fall-back school for those who applied here, didn't come and went to better known schools. They don't want to come." said Alexis Undi, a junior political science major and women and gender studies and communication minor.

According to Nolan, each student is assigned a rank that is a composite of their academic and co-curricular records. "The higher the number, the more attractive the student. The more attractive the student, the greater the scholarship."

Both need and merit based scholarship money come out of the same budget allotment.

Nolan explained that Santa Clara is also caught between "price and prestige."

He said that not only is Santa Clara competing with schools such as Boston College, but Santa Clara's average student would be a top student at some of the other Catholic universities in California -- and that is where they are getting higher scholarship offers.

Nolan said the application pool has increased from 5,842 three years ago to 8,904 today.

"Students who were wait-listed this year would have been admitted the year before, and would have been admitted with a scholarship the year before that," he said. "That's how dramatically the applicant pool has changed."

"We awarded $42 million dollars this year anticipating that we would spend the budgeted amount of $8.2 million dollars," he said. "This year we do have some money left over and we are awarding it to students on the waiting list who have the need, the students who made appeals to us and students who had bigger gaps than we would have liked them to have."

The 275 students admitted from the wait list have until the end of next week to enroll.

Nolan said this year the admitted students from the wait list consisted of many Latino, male and engineering students. He said colleges use the wait list to fill gaps in class demographics.

* Contact Nicole LaPrade at (408) 554-4546 or nlaprade@scu.edu.