Freshman Enrollment at USC Down 18% as Semester Begins

Despite unusual recruiting efforts, the University of Southern California is beginning the fall semester with 18% fewer freshmen than last year, officials said Thursday. As a result, USC has reduced its clerical staff and eliminated some part-time teaching positions.

“It’s significant but not overwhelming,” Gerald Segal, dean of USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said. Last year the freshman class was down by 7% from 1988, after several years of growth. The number of freshmen registered this week was 2,349, compared to 2,866 last fall. Among the causes cited are the national dip in the number of high school graduates, tough price competition from public universities and a controversial USC financial aid program that, critics complained, offered some students too much in loans and not enough in grants.

Increases in graduate students and in undergraduate transfers caused a growth in USC’s overall student body, from 26,914 last year to 26,954 now, and USC remains financially strong, campus leaders stressed.

But they clearly are worried that a few consecutive years of declining freshman enrollment could force dramatic cutbacks in courses and staff. USC has taken steps to boost next year’s freshman class by hiring admissions executives, changing scholarship formulas and planning increased recruiting in the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Texas and Florida.

Many colleges dug deeper into their waiting list of applicants this year in response to the decline in the demographic dip in 18-year-olds. Some saw drops in freshmen class sizes, but college officials around the country say that USC has one of the most dramatic dips.

“We are learning a lot about things that went wrong and how to correct them,” said Cliff Sjogren, USC’s dean of admissions and financial aid. Among the planned changes is a lessening of the importance of high school grades and test scores in the figuring of financial aid, Sjogren said.

This past spring, needy students with the strongest academic records were offered more in grants and less in loans compared to those with lower grades. According to a California education expert outside of USC, that formula backfired. The straight-A student probably had several prestigious colleges courting him while the B student who had his heart set on USC may have been forced because of finances to attend a less expensive public institution, said the expert, who asked not to be identified.

Undergraduate tuition and fees at USC, not including room and board, total $14,378, up 6.9% from last year, compared to $1,624 at a University of California school and $780 at a Cal State campus for state residents, both up 10% from 1989.

The College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, where freshmen take most of their classes, is the USC division most affected by the enrollment decline. According to Dean Segal, LAS has reduced the number of part-time lecturers by 26 to 180, of teaching assistant positions for graduate students by 28 to 750, and of non-teaching staff positions by 19 to 293.

Across the university, about 150 non-teaching staff positions have been cut from a total of about 8,000 such jobs, said Dennis Dougherty, USC’s executive vice president for administration. However, Dougherty stressed that almost all of those affected employees found other work on campus if they wanted to because normal turnover produces about 190 job openings a month.

USC officials say they hope that the executive turmoil in the admissions office, with four leaders in the past six years, has ended. A veteran admissions chief from the University of Michigan, Sjogren took over last year.